Basque country hails ‘forgotten’ retelling of Picasso’s Guernica

Agustin Ibarrola's 1977 version was painted as part of campaign to get the original returned from New York

The grief-snapped mother is still there, cradling her dead child 84 years on, as is the fallen soldier with his stigmata and the horse with its silent screams.

However, the Guernica now on its way to a museum in the Basque country is not Pablo Picasso's monochrome howl of anti-fascist fury but a retelling of the work intended to help bring the original to the market town whose agonies beneath waves of German and Italian bombers inspired its creation - and to denounce the subsequent horrors of the Franco dictatorship.