A BBC correspondent has returned a painting given to him as a wedding gift because it turned out to be a priceless masterpiece looted from a Berlin museum during World War Two.

A German farmer gave the 16th Century portrait of Eleonora of Toledo to Charles Wheeler in 1952, saying he had received it from a Russian soldier in exchange for two sacks of potatoes to make vodka.

For the next 50 years Mr Wheeler took the miniature with him on assignments all around the world before it ended up at his cottage near Horsham.

He had long believed the portrait by Alessandro Allori was a fake until he began researching the subject of missing art for a BBC radio programme last year.

Now he has handed it back to Berlin's Gemaeldegalerie after discovering it was a priceless original looted from the museum during the war. It was last seen in 1939.

The portrait had been to Delhi, Washington and Brussels during Mr Wheeler's career.

More recently it was propped up on his bookshelf next to a photo of his brother John, an RAF pilot killed during the war.

Burglars stole televisions and radios from the cottage on four separate occasions but always left the unframed painting alone.

Mr Wheeler said: "I'm rather pleased about it all.

"Instead of sitting on my bookshelf all these years, it's going to be exhibited properly."

Mr Wheeler, who is the BBC's longest-serving foreign correspondent, recalled that he was given the painting while doing a programme called Letters Without Signature in which people living in the eastern part of Berlin could write a letter.

He said: "The farmer reached into his pocket, took out a brown envelope and said it was a wedding present for me.

"He didn't want to take it back to East Berlin because he had already been searched twice on the way over by the communist police."

The painting was identified after Mr Wheeler contacted the Commission for Looted Art in Europe.

Anne Webber, co-chair of the commission, contacted galleries in Germany with a description of the oil-on-wood painting that measures 12 cm (4.72 inches) by 16 cm (6.29 inches) on the chance that one of them might recognise it.

The Gemaeldegalerie, which holds one of the world's leading collections of European art from the 13th through to the 18th Centuries, promptly faxed back a photograph they had taken of the painting before putting it into storage in 1939.

The gallery had believed that the missing painting had either been taken to Russia after the war or burned.

Ms Webber said: "We are delighted to have made possible the identification and return of this lovely painting.

"This is the fourth of Germany's war losses whose return we have enabled in the last six months.

"The gallery were very excited. They had believed the picture had disappeared forever and suddenly here it was."

Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which covers all of Berlin's state museums, said the return had raised hopes that other missing works could be located.

The miniature, done on poplar wood, depicts Eleonora of Toledo, whose husband Cosimo di Medici was the first Duke of Florence.