France has laid claim to a 17th Century painting currently being displayed by a London gallery at an art fair in Paris.

The Carrying of the Cross by the French master Nicolas Tournier was bought last year for 400,000 euros ($550,000) by the Weiss Gallery of London.

But the French government says it is stolen property and that its whereabouts had been a mystery for nearly 200 years.

France has put an export ban on the work to prevent it leaving the country.

Tournier's life-sized study of Christ carrying the cross once hung in the chapel of the Company of the Black Penitents in the southern French city of Toulouse....