PROMINENT Australian artist Joe Furlonger has been asked to inspect up to $1million worth of paintings and lithographs — seized in a raid on Friday — to establish whether any of them are his work.

Brisbane police have asked Furlonger to help authenticate the art, which is among works that have allegedly gone missing from gallery storerooms in Brisbane and Sydney.

The Furlonger material — more than 300 pieces — is included in hundreds of paintings, etchings and prints taken as evidence when police raided the Brisbane suburban home of artist Richard Dunlop.

Dunlop, 44, has been charged with stealing a painting allegedly produced by Allyson Reynolds, a partner in the Brisbane-based Doggett Street Studio art gallery.

He has strongly denied any wrongdoing and said he will defend the charge when it comes before the Brisbane Magistrates Court on September 12.

Brisbane police yesterday scheduled a press conference, where the confiscated artwork was to be displayed. IT was later cancelled because the investigation was “ongoing”.

A police spokeswoman said the artworks were allegedly stolen from the Doggett Street Studio art gallery in 1994 and from Sydney galleries between 1996 and 2003. The haul was estimated to be worth between $500,000 and $1million.

Eighteen prints by Australia’s leading contemporary painter William Robinson went missing from the Ray Hughes Gallery in the late 1990s. The fact that theworks could not be accounted for played a part in Robinson’s decision to leave Ray Hughes for other dealers in 1999, after more than 20 years showing with him.

Several of them, including Early Sun and Bush Fire, were sold at Sotheby’s in 2001 for $2640 each. Another, Tweed Valley, sold for $1080. (The retail price of each work now would be between $5000 and $8000.)

Dunlop confirmed last night that he was the vendor of the lithographs sold through Sotheby’s. He said he had bought one “with my wife at the time and I was given the others in lieu of sales of paintings from Ray Hughes”.

“Ray Hughes encouraged me, as he may have encouraged other people, to take artworks in lieu of payment for my own works,” he said. “That was the means by which I acquired those works. As for the remainder of the 18 works William Robinson has expressed concerns about, I know nothing of them. It may be that there is no record of a transaction.”

Furlonger told The Australian yesterday that he expected to be shown the artworks thought to be his later this week.

“A detective asked me to identify a couple of things because Richard (Dunlop) has bought paintings of mine in the past on a couple of occasions,” he said.

“I could not identify the work when it was just described to me over the telephone. Anyway, that would be unfair.

“I have got a fair idea, but I don’t want to do this exercise over the phone. You do reams of work and it is put aside. Richard was a friend of mine and years ago he bought two works of mine through my dealer, one of them a very large painting.

“I am not making any judgments on this issue until I see the material the police have seized.”

The allegation is that over the past 12 years, hundreds of pieces of artwork have been taken from storerooms of major galleries in Sydney, Brisbane and Hobart.

Mr Hughes, a leading Sydney art dealer, said artworks had gone missing from his storeroom and he understood police wanted to confirm whether the material they had seized had come from his collections he kept for clients.