Oldham painting could go for £500,000

UNDER the hammer: the painting of Andromeda.

A 142-year-old oil painting from Oldham said to be “one of the finest Victorian nude paintings ever produced” is expected to sell for up to £500,000 today.

Andromeda by Sir Edward Poynter was originally owned by wealthy Victorian cotton merchant Charles Lees of Werneth Park.

It passed to his widow, Oldham’s first female mayor, Dame Sarah Lees, and when she died in 1935, to her daughter, the philanthropist Marjory Lees, who died in 1970.

The painting was sold after her death and fetched only £750 when auctioned at Sotheby’s in London.

It is now expected to fetch between £300,000 and £500,000 at Sotheby’s today.

The 20ins x 14ins nude could alert one of Britain’s richest men, the multi-millionaire Cats, Evita and The Phantom Of The Opera composer, Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber.

He paid the current world auction record for a picture by Sir Edward Poynter of £551,500 at Sotheby’s in London in 1994 for the 1903 masterpiece, The Cave Of The Storm Nymphs, which Sotheby’s described as “arguably the most erotic Victorian painting of nudes.”

Andromeda was a princess from Greek mythology, chained to a rock as a sacrifice to a sea monster. Perseus, returning from slaying the gorgon, Medusa, rescued her.

Charles Lees began working in the family cotton spinning and weaving business in the late 1850s, taking it over some 20 years later. It was highly profitable, providing him with the time and money to pursue his interests in religion and the arts.

He married Sarah Buckley in Oldham in 1874. After Charles’s death in 1894, Sarah and her daughter continued to live at Werneth Park.