Two highly important paintings by the great Scottish artist Jack ‘Tiziano’ Vettriano have been saved for the nation after a public appeal raised £200 million to keep them in the United Kingdom.

The paintings – both typically sultry interior scenes showing glamorous scantily-clad women in stockings and high heels attempting unsuccessfully to seduce stern-faced private detectives dressed in double-breasted suits holding glasses of whisky and smoking cigarettes while avoiding setting fire to the curtains – were found hanging unrecognised in the vestibule of a public library somewhere on Humberside (right).

“We’re absolutely overjoyed that the great unwashed has seen fit to secure these masterpieces of western painting for an ungrateful nation,” said Sir Jock Strapp of the Scottish Heritage Memorial Fund, which donated some of the cash. “They belong to a highly important cycle of paintings known as The Triumph of Lingerie commissioned in the 1990s by Sir Tim Rice-Krispies for his three-bedroomed house in Surbiton. The other three canvases in the cycle are happily…er, I mean sadly, still missing.”

Branded ‘The People’s Painter’ by a fawning BBC South Bank Show documentary, Vettriano has been consistently snubbed by an elitist art establishment. Despite his prolific output, not a single work by the self-taught dauber of Fife exists in any major museum collection in the United Kingdom.

“Art history will have to be rewritten following this momentous Humberside discovery,” said leading art critic Briony Sewage.

Dave Vasari