This is how the story goes: one day in 1962, an Irish builder walked into a junk shop on Battersea Rise in south London, carrying a painting in an elaborate gilt frame. He said that he’d found it behind a panel above a chimneypiece while demolishing a vacant house nearby. Hoping to flog it for a few quid, he haggled with the shop’s owner, before agreeing a price of £60. Unbeknownst to him, the picture was Flaming June (1895), by the eminent Victorian artist Frederic Leighton.

“It’s probably a cock-and-bull story,” says Daniel Robbins, senior curator of the Leighton House Museum in west London, referring to this dramatic tale of the picture’s rediscovery. (Art historians remain uncertain about its whereabouts between 1930 and 1962.) “But it has attached itself to the myth of the painting.”