Brilliant Lincolnshire farmhouse find

The pictures were painted by Louis Bosworth Hurt (1856-1929), one of the most unusual landscape artists of the late Victorian period. A student of George Turner (aka ‘Derbyshire’s John Constable’) Hurt was born and brought up in Ashbourne in Derbyshire, moved thirteen and a half miles

to South Darley in the Peak District after his marriage, but spent his artistic career painting dramatic, moody, scenes of the Scottish Highlands.

James Laverack of auctioneers John Taylors said: “In fairness, Hurt did travel to Scotland a lot, sketching in the wildest glens and mountains that he could reach, remote landscapes in which often the only living creatures to be seen were Highland cattle. And he really did love a Highland cow or three in his pictures; indeed, he was so passionate about the animals that he kept a herd in Derbyshire so that he could get them right in his paintings.”

James added: “Hurt was just one of the painters attracted north of the border by ‘Balmorality’, Victorian England’s romantic love of all things Scottish, particularly the Highland life, triggered by the Royal Family’s purchase of a Deeside estate in 1847. He was, however, unusual in devoting so much of his time to the one subject, for so long and from so far away. He never moved to Scotland”.

The two Hurt pictures in the auction on Tuesday, April 16, have been entered by members of a Lincolnshire farming family who acquired them more than 50 years ago.

James said: “These big pictures hanging on the walls in the sitting room of the house came as a lovely surprise – you don’t see many Highland cows in

Lincolnshire! The paintings have everything that made Hurt’s work famous - streams flowing through glens in wild mountainous scenery, skies all but obliterated by the mist - and Highland cows.

“One of the pictures is a rare early work - A Mountain Stream in Strathfillan - a scene in the Trossachs, which the 24-year-old Hurt painted in 1881, the year that he achieved his first entry in a Royal Academy Exhibition. The second, slightly larger picture of Highland cattle in and around a stream, (125 x 83cms) dates from 1905, by which point Hurt was famous and wealthy with numerous influential patrons. His pictures were by then selling for as much as forty

pounds a time!”

James added: “They cost a bit more today. Highland pictures do go through phases when they’re in or out of fashion and so values fluctuate, but any large Hurt painting is going to make well into four figures at auction and, with interest rising in the past two or three years, some of his paintings have been making into five figures.”

These Highland paintings . . . by a Derbyshire artist . . . that have spent decades in a Lincolnshire farmhouse . . . are now attracting international interest.

People in New York and Arizona are amongst those who have registered to bid in the auction. They have each been given what has been described as modest pre-sale estimates of £5,000-£6,000.