The original rejected portrait by Lucian Freud shown for the first time after confirmation | Lucian Freud

The original image is Lucian Freudwhich the artist denied was his for many years, is to be shown for the first time after experts confirmed that it was painted by him.

Man in a Black Scarf was created in 1939 by a British artist while he was a student at the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting in Hadleigh, Suffolk. The occupant is thought to be John Jameson, Freud’s friend and scion of the whiskey family.

The project gained notoriety after appearing on the BBC’s Fake or Fortune? shows in 2016, and historian Philip Mold concluded very much Freud.

But the picture was complicated by the fact that Freud had it repeatedly he denied that the job was his before his death in 2011. In 1985, Christie recognized it as a painting by the artist, but reversed his decision when Freud said he had not painted it.

The resistance seemed to stem from Freud’s conflict with the original owners of the work, Denis Wirth-Miller and Richard Choppingwith whom he attended Suffolk school as a teenager.

“He was the golden boy, he was a star even then and there was jealousy,” says artist and writer Jon Lys Turner, who received the job and says Wirth-Miller kept a list from their school days called “13 Reasons to Hate Lucian”.

Wirth-Miller told Turner that he could have a painting on conditions that he could prove and sell “to piss off Lucian”. Turner then tried to have the work signed as Freud at the age of 19 – without success, as the artists did not want to publicly argue with the artist.

Two years after Fake or Fortune? broadcast, new evidence emerged that supported Turner’s case. Students at Suffolk The art school recognized what he was doing at the end of each day, and documents stored in Tate Britain’s archives show that Freud painted John Jameson in 1939.

The Man in Black Scarf will now be shown publicly for the first time in the exhibition Benton End: Pollen Paradise and Paint on. Garden Museum in London. The show takes its name a Suffolk farmhouse which hosted Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines’s East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing.

Freud too artist Morris a year after the filming of Black Scarf. The work is held at the National Museum of Wales and resembles the Man in Black Scarf.

Turner says the show will establish an overlooked bond between Morris and his student Freud. “(The picture) is opposite and the big eyes are very thickly painted and intricately constructed. It’s a very clever way to capture that person,” he said. “He took this from Morris.”

Turner never had a price for the Man in the Black Scarf, but in 2016 it was estimated to be worth more than $300,000. However, Freud’s work can take a lot of money: in 2015, his Benefits Supervisor Resting was sold. $56m (£42m), and its sales record is $86 million. Next month another of Freud’s works, Sleeping with the Lion Carpet, is being sold and Sotheby’s in London with an estimate of £25m to £35m.