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- Roald Dahl: Years ago, when I started buying old paintings at country house auctions all over England, I decided I'd better learn to clean and restore them myself. So I did. One day I bought a small painting for 25 pence from a junk shop in Brighton. It didn't even have a stretch shape. It was just a loose canvas and it had almost certainly been cut out of it's frame by a thief. When I cleaned off the top layer of paint, there underneath it was a beautiful little Renoir landscape. The idea for the story you're going to see now actually came to me while I working on this picture.