A fabulous art collection amassed by a ruthless press baron may return to Britain, after a court battle between his descendants and a tiny gallery in Canada.

Lord Beaverbrook, the political bruiser and Express proprietor, was memorably caricatured as Lord Copper in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, in which underlings never dared to disagree with his wrong statements and instead said: “Up to a point, Lord Copper.”

Now a Canadian judge is expected rule within the next two weeks on the legal point of who now owns 133 paintings, drawings and sculptures, estimated to be worth more than £100 million and including works by Turner, Gainsborough, Botticelli, DalÍ and Lucien Freud..

For three years Lord Beaverbrook’s family and trustees of the Canadian art gallery established in his name have been locked in bitter litigation. The paintings are held by the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, the province of Canada where Max Aitken — later Lord Beaverbrook — was born in 1879. He died in 1964.

The gallery claims that the paintings were gifts from the tycoon, but the London-based Beaverbrook Foundation (UK), headed by Max Aitken III, the present Lord Beaverbrook and grandson of the first, insists that the art was on loan.

The Beaverbrook Foundation says that the gallery is attempting to rewrite history to cling on to the artworks. The gallery, in turn, has accused Beaverbrook’s grandsons of having their grandfather “exhumed and forensically dissected in such a way that his reputation will never recover”.

The son of a Presbyterian preacher, Aitken left Canada in 1910 to make his fortune in Britain, which he did with astonishing speed and success, becoming a Conservative MP, political bruiser and newspaper proprietor. A friend of Churchill, Beaverbrook served during the war as Minister of Information and then Minister of Aircraft Production and Minister of Supply. By the 1950s Beaverbrook’s titles, including the Daily and Sunday Express and Evening Standard, had a combined circulation of more than five million, which he used to further his own political ends.

In 1954 Beaverbrook built the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, in homage to his homeland, and began to stock it with the artworks he had gathered. He also established the Beaverbrook Foundation to look after his philanthropic interests.

Typically, he never made his intentions clear. By 1959, 89 works had been installed in Fredericton, but he also appears to have had a change of heart and, without telling the gallery board, he allegedly amended the trust deeds to grant ownership to his foundation.

In 2004 the Beaverbrook Foundation (UK), demanded the return of two of the most valuable paintings, Turner’s Fountain of Indolence and Lucien Freud’s Hotel Bedroom, the only work by Freud in Canada. The foundation intended to sell the works, and use the money to restore Cherkley Court, Beaverbrook’s dilapidated estate in Surrey. The Freud is estimated to be worth £4 million, while the Turner could fetch as much as £18.5 million.

The foundation also demanded that the gallery acknowledge that the paintings it held “are and at all times have been owned by the foundation trustees”. The gallery refused, insisting that Lord Beaverbrook had intended the paintings to remain a permanent collection in Canada.

“The most reliable thing in this entire case is Lord Beaverbrook’s self-interest,” Larry Lowenstein, the lead lawyer for the gallery, said recently. “The idea of him building this collection so that suddenly a meat cleaver could be chopped down just doesn’t make any sense.” The current Lord Beaverbrook declared bankruptcy in 1992, and the Canadian media has made much of his financial ventures, including an online gambling website called Cheeky Moon, which reportedly offers “cheeky games for all the family, from Cheeky Bingo to . . . Naughty Netball”. One supporter of the gallery, former curator Stuart Smith, described the dispute as “a money grab” by Beaverbrook’s heirs.

Lord Beaverbrook, 55, bitterly rejects the implication that he stands to gain personally from the repatriation of his grandfather’s collection, and the sale of two of the most valuable paintings. “That is an outrageous lie,” he said, pointing out that he and the family are acting as trustees of the foundation. “We have been portrayed as being on a family picture-grab.” Cherkley Court, which is part of the Beaverbrook Foundation, has recently been refurbished and the foundation plans to open it to the public as a research centre containing the Beaverbrook archives and Lloyd George papers. “It cost a lot of money, but it had to be done,” said Lord Beaverbrook. “We believe the weight of evidence is overwhelming. Before this dispute, the gallery had confirmed in every imaginable way the foundation’s ownership of these pictures since 1955.” The Canadian Supreme Court judge Peter Cory is reported to be close to a verdict, after three years grappling with the mind of the first Lord Beaverbrook.

As H. G. Wells said of the newspaper magnate: “If ever Max ever gets to Heaven, he won’t last long. He will be chucked out for trying to pull off a merger between Heaven and Hell after having secured a controlling interest in key subsidiary companies in both places, of course.”

The current Lord Beaverbrook insists that his ancestor never intended to give the paintings to the Canadian gallery. He said: “I have no reason to think he would change his mind today, from wherever he is looking down. . . or up.”

Art and the man

Some of the paintings in the Beaverbrook gallery

— J. M. W. Turner, The Fountain of Indolence (1834)

— Lucian Freud, Hotel Bedroom (1954)

— Salvador DalÍ, Equestrian Fantasy: Lady Dunn (1954)

— Cornelius Krieghoff, Merrymaking (1860)

— William Hogarth, John Pine (c 1755)

— Sandro Botticelli, The Resurrection (c 1490).

— Ruskin Spear, Portrait of Winston Churchill (1957)

— Thomas Gainsborough, Lieutenant-Colonel Edmund Nugent (1764)

— Joshua Reynolds, Mrs Thrale and her Daughter Hester (1781)

— John Singer Sargent, San Vigilio, Lake Garda (1913)

What Lord Beaverbrook said

“Buy old masters. They fetch a better price than old mistresses”

“The British electors will not vote for a man who does not wear a hat”

“On the rock-bound coast of New Brunswick the waves break incessantly. Every now and then comes a particularly dangerous wave that breaks viciously into the rock. It is called ‘The Rage’. That’s me”

What was said about him

“His personal force and genius made this Aitken’s finest hour” — Winston Churchill, on his war service

“He had a gift for making you feel when you were with him that you were the most important person in the world. Of course I knew he forgot about me the moment I left the room but it was magical all the same” — the historian, A.J.P. Taylor “The only evil man I ever met” — Clement Attlee

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