More than 50 works of art, nearly lost to the nation through forgery and deception, have been received by the National Galleries of Scotland.

More than 50 works of art, nearly lost to the nation through forgery and deception, have been received by the National Galleries of Scotland.

The six oil paintings and 51 watercolours and drawings by the Scottish 19th century painter David Roberts, worth more than £500,000, have been given to the nation by the Art Fund, the UK's leading art charity.

However, they nearly never made their way north of the border. The paintings belonged to a devoted collector of and authority on Robert's work, Helen Guiterman. He had been largely forgotten until she re-established his reputation with 30 years of painstaking research.

Before she died, she arranged, via the Art Fund, that her collection should go to the National Galleries.

After her death in 1998, Shaun Gray, the grandson of Helen Guiterman's cousin, claimed to be her executor and gave varying accounts of what had happened to the artworks.

When he claimed that Ms Guiterman had changed her will and they would no longer be donated to the Art Fund, the charity told the police.

In 2006, after an investigation by the police and HM Revenue and Customs, Gray was jailed for three years' at Bournemouth Crown Court after admitting charges of false accounting and forgery. He had forged her will making himself entitled to her estate, including the works by Roberts.

Now, though, the works are in Edinburgh and some of the drawings will be included in the exhibition, Imagining Spain: From Goya to Picasso, The British and Spain, from 18 July to 11 October at the National Gallery complex.

David Barrie, the director of the Art Fund, said: "Helen Guiterman was a devoted collector of the work of David Roberts, who, during his lifetime, was one of the best-known and most influential 19th century British artists.

"The Art Fund has gone to great lengths to ensure that her generous wishes are fulfilled and I'm delighted that this impressive collection will at last join the National Galleries of Scotland."

John Leighton, the director-general of the National Galleries, said: "We are particularly grateful to the Art Fund for all its efforts to ensure that Ms Guiterman's wishes were fulfilled. The Art Fund has displayed extraordinary generosity in its support for public collections across Scotland over many years."

Helen Guiterman, who was born in 1916, studied at the Slade School of Art, London.

She became interested in David Roberts after buying two works purportedly by him in the early 1960s. Finding little information, she determined to track down more.

During 30 years of research she traced the artist's descendants and through them, surviving journals and letters, tracking down hundreds of works attributed to Roberts.

She selected and catalogued exhibitions of his work in 1967, 1981 and a full retrospective at the Barbican Gallery in 1986.

Roberts was born in 1796, the son of a shoemaker in Stockbridge in Edinburgh. With a talent for drawing, he was apprenticed to a heraldic painter, then a house painter, before joining a touring theatre company as a scene painter.

Soon after exhibiting his first paintings in London in 1824, he began to travel, visiting the Near East, Spain and Egypt.