Now, three months since Dulwich picture gallery challenged the public to "spot the fake" after replacing one of their collection masterpieces with a Chinese replica, the gallery has finally revealed the counterfeit.
I had seen his countryman, Aravinda de Silva, make the same score at the same venue in the same way 19 years earlier – each were masterpieces of classical one-day batsmanship that I was privileged to witness and will never forget.
American Beauty will, I think, quickly find itself in the category of masterpieces such as The Graduate, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Ordinary People.
So if my calculations are correct and the National Gallery sell all their tickets, you will still have 720 punters in the gallery at any given time fighting to see seven masterpieces.
The biography sensitively uncovers the facts of an unusual life that Fitzgerald was reticent about and reveals the voluminous research she undertook, then used economically in novels that appear simple on the surface but are complex masterpieces.
Although Paulette Dubost, who has died aged 100, appeared in far more films than the number of years she lived for, most cinemagoers know her best as Lisette, the coquettish chambermaid in Jean Renoir's La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939), one of cinema's masterpieces.
Born in 1910, abandoned and brought up by the state, homosexual, imprisoned for thieving at 16, sent out to join the foreign legion at 18, then imprisoned for petty crime repeatedly in the 1940s, he had at the same time produced the masterpieces that attracted the attention and solidarity of Cocteau, Sartre and André Breton.
Schwabing has traditionally been the bohemian quarter of the Bavarian capital, and it's not out of the question that some of the modernist masterpieces hoarded in Gurlitt's flat were painted only a couple of streets away: Franz Marc, Paul Klee and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner drank in the local bars, and some of their most famous works are still on display in Munich's modern art gallery down the road.
Little in Pawlikowski's career hinted at something so accomplished: Ida is now talked of as one of Poland's cinematic masterpieces.
Tellingly, his characters break off from admiring the masterpieces in order to knock dead bluebottles out of the canopy overhead.
So we can look back at Abbott's great ads and see masterpieces of paid-for communication which exactly caught, and perhaps even directed, the spirit of the age.
