One Leeds businessman thought he'd hit the jackpot when he found a rare early 1900s painting by the legendary Marc Chagall, only to have his dreams go up in smoke after what he thought was a timeless masterpiece was confiscated and destroyed. Frustrated art enthusiast Martin Lang had bought it in 1992 for £100,000 - but ended up with nothing as 's team confirmed it was a cunning forgery.

The painting of a curvy reclining woman, simply titled Nude, was originally created between 1909 and 1910 - and Lang had the shock of his life when he took it on the BBC show Fake Or Fortune and was told it had actually been painted in the 1930s. The early modernist artist, who experimented with cubism and expressionism, could not have been the creator of the version Lang had in his possession, as he'd painted the original more than two decades earlier. The heartbroken owner, realising he'd likely been scammed, sent it to the Chagall committee in France where the painter had lived, for further evaluation.

According to French law, forgeries can be destroyed - and a spokesperson for the committee, which controls the artist's estate, declared she was in "no doubt" that she was looking at a counterfeit.

Scientific testing clarified that the pigments in the paint dated back to much later than the real painting had been made - and after making the pricey purchase, Lang ended up with absolutely nothing.

Asked at the time whether he'd launch a court battle against the destruction of the art, he told the BBC: "I don't see there's a point. It's a lost cause, so I've just said, 'No, it's not worth it.'

"There's no point contesting [it]. It's in France, it's a French court, they will come back on their side. It's a terrible shame."

Chagall had Russian roots - and art dealer James Butterwick, who specialises in paintings from that country, has claimed that over 90 per cent of the art on the Russian market is fake.

Lang had been keen to keep the worthless painting as a "memento" and had proposed to the committee that they could mark the back of it with the words "Forgery" to prevent its resale and then send it back to him.

However, they stood firm and it ended up being burnt to a crisp after it was set on fire.

Despite the tragedy of the occasion, there have been times when paintings thought to be fake were discovered to be real, too, with Edgar Degas' Danseuse Bleue consequently being upgraded in price from a few hundred pounds to over £500,000.