The painting The presentation of the baby Jesus to Saint Barbara, by the Flemish painter Anton van Dyck, remains secure in an insurance company’s safe deposit box in Seville waiting to find out what its next destination will be. For several generations this canvas, measuring 130 by 92 cm, has been hanging in pride of place at a family home in Jaén (southern Spain). The family always looked at it with admiration, but little did they know that every day they were sitting under a masterpiece.

To the astonishment and disbelief of the family, a Madrid art company authenticated the painting as a work by Anton van Dyck (1599-1641) last year. Along with Rubens, the artist is considered the most important of the Flemish painters. The heir to this family legacy, who has been inundated with offers from famous auction houses, has the Museum of Fine Arts of Seville at the top of his list of buyers. Managed by the Junta de Andalucía, the museum has already shown its interest in adding the painting to their art collection.

The Andalusian Ministry of Culture confirmed to EL PAÍS that the family wrote to them in July to inform them of the existence of the canvas, but now they are waiting to resume contact to delve deeper into the matter. “If, as it seems, it is a Van Dyck, anything that enriches the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts is of interest to us, of course it is,” says a spokesperson from the Ministry. The painting is kept under lock and key and the owner, at the moment, has not allowed photos to be taken.

“The owner of the painting has no intention of speculating, but he does have a special interest in it staying in Seville, the city where the family now lives and with which he has a special connection,” says Luis Baena, the lawyer representing the painting’s owner, who wishes to remain anonymous for the moment. Van Dyck is a key painter in the development of the Sevillian baroque due to the influence he had among 17th century artists.

It is thought that the painting might have reached the home of this family in Jaén through Seville (where part of the family lived) in the 17th century. This was when more than a hundred Flemish families, mainly merchants and bankers, settled in the Andalusian city. After its authenticity was certified, the canvas, which showed obvious signs of deterioration as it was a painting from the first third of the 17th century, was restored by a workshop of renowned Andalusian professionals.

At the moment, The presentation of the baby Jesus to Saint Barbara does not have an official appraisal, although its owners anticipate that they will ask for “a fair and reasonable price.” In any case, it is known that, after coming to light, this work of art will be significantly revalued. Just this year, art collector Albert B. Roberts bought an oil sketch of Saint Jerome with an angel that had been found in a shed in upstate New York for over $600. After offering the work to Sotheby’s auction house, he sold it for more than $3 million. Part of those profits went to the Albert B. Roberts Foundation, which provides financial support to artists and various charities.

“It is very difficult to specify an approximate value of this type of work of art. Each painting has its own features,” says Consuelo Durán, who manages the Durán auction house. In any case, up to more than €9 million ($9.4 million) have been paid for Anton van Dyck’s works in the past. That was the amount that Alfred Bader and Philip Mold paid in 2009 at an auction at Sotheby’s in London, which set a record for works by the Flemish painter.

In a case similar to what occurred with the Andalusian family, a priest from the county of Cheshire in the United Kingdom bought a portrait for £400 ($482) in 2014. It was later revealed that it was a sketch of one of the magistrates that the Dutch artist portrayed in 1634. The resulting painting decorated the walls in Brussels city hall until it was destroyed in a French attack on the Belgian capital 61 years later.

Anton Van Dyck became the first court painter in England after a long stay in Italy. He is universally known for his portraits of the Genoese nobility and of Charles I, king of England and Scotland, his family members and his court. In addition to portraits, for which he was highly appreciated, he also dealt with biblical and mythological themes, introducing some notable pictorial innovations.

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This is a story full of fairy tales. In some ways, it even resembles one. And yet it also proves that, in the real world, things rarely end happily ever after. A few days ago, Bill Willingham, the father of the celebrated Fables comic book series, announced that he was sending his most cherished work to the public domain, that is, to everyone. That’s only fair, since that is also where he got the main characters of his stories, from Snow White to the Wolf, from Pinocchio to Prince Charming, who were then relocated to modern New York. In this tale, the hero has long-faced mistreatment at the hands of the villains, DC Comics, the owner of Vertigo, which publishes the work in the United States, and its executives.

“If I couldn’t prevent Fables from falling into bad hands, at least this is a way I can arrange that it also falls into many good hands,” Willingham wrote in an online post in which he decried the label’s repeated attempts to take over his creations and opposed them with this final extreme remedy. But the company responded that it considers itself to be the true owner of the series.

In a statement published by the specialized media IGN, the company threatened to take “necessary action” to defend its rights. Thus, the end of the dispute is uncertain. But it is unlikely that everyone will end up happily ever after.

In the meantime, in a new post, Willingham celebrated the massive support he received. In fact, for the moment, he has declined all interview requests — he did not respond to this newspaper’s request, nor did the publisher — arguing that he preferred to spend the next few days working on new artistic projects. Meanwhile, the dispute continues.

Fables is one of the most celebrated graphic novels of the last 20 years, and it has spawned spin-offs and a video game adaptation (The Wolf Among Us).

This situation also touches on a key issue, namely, the intellectual property rights of characters and works, especially in a sector where, for decades, dozens of cartoonists and screenwriters have accused comic book giants Marvel and DC of pressuring them to cede their ideas and accept commissioned contracts.

Willingham sums it up as a policy aimed to make creators sign “work for hire” agreements and crush them. All of this makes a gesture that was already intended to make a splash even more resonant.

Indeed, the battle over intellectual property is as old as contemporary comics: the copyrights for Superman, Batman and The Fantastic Four all have unresolved disputes and complaints from Jerry Siegel, Bill Finger and Jack Kirby over the contemptuous treatment they suffered. And heavyweight Alan Moore has been lamenting for years that DC took away his ownership of famous works like Watchmen.

Along with prestige and principles, tens of millions of dollars are at stake, especially now that the film industry has become interested in comics.

“When you sign a contract with DC, your responsibilities to them are carved in stone, where their responsibilities to you are treated as “helpful suggestions that we’ll try to accommodate when we can, but we’re serious adults, doing serious business and we can’t always take the time to indulge the needs of these children who work for us” the Fables author wrote on his blog. Following the impact of his original message, Willingham posted two other texts. He maintains that he had thought about sending his work into the public domain when he passed away, but that “certain events” have changed his plans: among them, he lists the changes in management and attitude at the top of the publishing company; the multiple breaches of obligations such as consultations about covers, artists for new plots and adaptations; DC’s forgetfulness when it came to pay, which forced him to demand invoices of up to $30,000; the suspicious frequency with which the publisher attributed it to “slipping through the cracks” (to such an extent that the author insisted that they stop using that expression); and the time and chances he gave them to respect the pact, renegotiate it or even break it and consensually separate.

A detail from the cover of the first volume of Bill Willingham’s comprehensive collection of ‘Fables’.

“Shortly after creating Fables, I entered into a publishing agreement with DC Comics. In that agreement, while I continued to own the property, DC would have exclusive rights to publish Fables comics, and then later that agreement was expanded to give DC exclusive rights to exploit the property in other ways, including movies and TV.

DC paid me a fair price for these rights (fair at the time), and as long as they behaved ethically and above-board, and conducted themselves as if this were a partnership, all was more or less well. But DC doesn’t seem to be capable of acting fairly and above-board.

In fact, they treated this agreement (as I suppose I should have known they would) as if they were the boss and I, their servant. In time that got worse, as they later reinterpreted our contracts to assume they owned Fables outright,” Willingham laments. Hence, he concluded that “you can’t reason with the unreasonable.”

Having ruled out a lawsuit as too expensive and time-consuming at 67 years of age, he found a more creative solution: if they prevented him from owning his works and benefiting from them as he was entitled to do, he would not let the publisher do so either. Or, at least, everyone could use the comics as they wished. But the label was quick to clarify in its statement to IGN: “The Fables comic books and graphic novels [are] published by DC, and are not in the public domain”.

For his part, Willingham promises to continue fighting for all the conditions of his still-in-force contract that he considers DC to have violated, as well as for the last installments of the series, the final script of which he delivered two years ago.

There will be additional chapters in this dispute, as well as in many other ones like it: in 2024, the historic first image of Mickey Mouse, the one that starred in the 1928 short Steamboat Willie, enters the public domain in the U.S. and other countries. Copyright in the U.S. lasts for 95 years, and math is an exact science.

Therefore, in a few years, King Kong, Superman and Popeye will meet the same fate. But The New York Times has wondered how the “notoriously litigious” Disney will react and how far it will go to fight in court. And who would dare to freely use all these works for fear of a million-dollar lawsuit? The same question surrounds DC and similar companies. Because in the real world, fairy tales are rare. Or they end up in court.