Valuable 350-year-old oil paintings found in skip

German police have issued an appeal for information after two valuable 17th Century paintings were discovered dumped in a road-side skip.

The oil paintings are believed to be by Dutch artist Samuel van Hoogstraten and Italian Pietro Bellotti, police said.

A man found the paintings at a motorway service station on the A7 south of Würzburg in Bavaria last month.

He handed them in to police in the city of Cologne. No one has yet claimed the artworks.

An initial assessment by an art expert concluded the two framed paintings were originals, police said.

One is a portrait of a boy wearing a red hat with an unknown date. Police say it was painted by Samuel van Hoogstraten, a painter and writer who lived in the Netherlands between 1627 and 1678.