As a powerful London fashion PR said on hearing the news, “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of people” Miaow.. As portraits go, it is a masterful piece of royal propaganda. The artist shows an imperious aristocrat exuding the gallantry that led him to offer to replace his cousin, Charles I, on the executioner’s scaffold. Richard Drake, a Texan who has built a gallery on the side of his mansion to house his collection, is demanding a refund after finding the picture may be a copy by a pupil of Van Dyck.The painting was bought by Mr Drake in June 1998 after his buying agent, based in New Orleans, was told “unequivocally” by Agnews that it was by the portraitist to the House of Stuart, the High Court was told. Lawyers for Mr Drake accuse Agnews of falsely making a “massive profit” of 41 times the original price by selling on the work as a genuine Van Dyck.Experts agree that Van Dyck’s paintings of James Stuart are among the best examples of the painter’s talent for conveying the refinement and “integrity” of the 17th-century monarchy. The Duke of Lennox and Richmond was a favoured cousin of Charles I and a prominent figure in the royal court.

After his offer to replace Charles on the scaffold in 1649 was rejected he joined the royal party who buried the monarch. He himself died six years later, aged 43.The canvas was bought by Agnews in 1996 for just £36,000 at a Sotheby’s sale of the contents of Ickworth House in Suffolk, the family home of the Marquess of Bristol, who died in 1999 after years of drug abuse.Experts from Sotheby’s listed the painting as being “After Van Dyck”, meaning that it had been composed in the artist’s London studio “under his eye” and not by the master himself.But Julian Agnew, director of the 185-year-old London dealership, viewed the painting, completed in about 1636, and decided that the auctioneers had missed a genuine Van Dyck. It is a similar version of three other Van Dyck portraits of the duke that hang in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Louvre in Paris and Kenwood House in north London.The disputed painting was subsequently bought by Mr Drake after Mr Agnew had his opinion confirmed by art historians in France, America and Britain, the High Court was told. Joe Smouha, representing Mr Drake, claimed Agnews, the oldest gallery in England still in family hands, failed to disclose the original attribution by Sotheby’s.

He said: “This is not a typical dispute about the proper attribution of a painting where a dealer simply sells a painting with the same attribution that he bought it. Here, Agnews, in their enthusiasm for making the massive profit they did by reattributing the painting, made a number of serious misrepresentations.”There can be no doubt here that Agnews’ description of the painting as being by Van Dyck was the fundamental element of the sale upon which Mr Drake relied in deciding that he was willing to pay £1.5m.”An expert valuer is expected to tell the judge, Mr Justice Buckley, that the portrait is worth no more than £100,000 and would fetch about £500,000 if it was genuine. The court was told Mr Drake claims a leading expert on Van Dyck, Oliver Millar, surveyor emeritus of the Queen’s pictures, told Mr Agnew after he bought the work that it was “clearly a copy”.Agnews rejects Mr Drake’s claims, saying that although it still believes the work to be a genuine Van Dyck, it had stated in its sale catalogue that there was a “conflict of expert opinion” regarding the attribution.Charles Flint QC, for Agnews, said: “Agnews properly attributed the painting to Van Dyck and made fair disclosure of the conflict of expert opinion. There was no term of the contract that the painting was actually by Van Dyck and no representation to that effect.”The case is expected to last two weeks.. The Post Office has asked the Government for almost £2bn in subsidy to keep its network financially viable over the next five years, a leaked document obtained by The Independent reveals. It also proposes saving millions of pounds a year by closing smaller offices and making their service available in local shops.The Post Office’s appeal for funding was submitted to ministers last month, before the postal regulator Postcomm sounded the death knell for its historic monopoly.

Yesterday the Postcomm chairman Graham Corbett said he was opening up 30 per cent of the Post Office’s business to competition from April and the entire postal market by 2006.Consignia’s chief executive John Roberts said that the announcement left the Post Office in the dark. “My concern is that if you get this wrong, there’s no going back,” he said. “The key thing for us is that we do want to compete, we are going to compete and we will fight very hard in these markets.”The key issue is that nobody actually knows what the result of this kind of regulatory change is going to be, because nowhere else in the world has anybody tried it this way. “We are all working in the dark.”Critics warned that the regulator’s plans could threaten the guaranteed delivery of letters to every address in the country at the same price.