A portrait of the Queen by leading Scottish artist, Sir William Oliphant Hutchison, is expected to fetch up to £50,000 at auction.
Until it was acquired by its current owner, the painting hung for many years on the walls of the former Police Staff College at Bramshill House in Hampshire.
Sir William was born in Fife in 1889 and studied at Edinburgh College of Art (1909-12) under E. A. Walton, one of the Glasgow Boys group of artists, whose daughter he married. He also spent time working and studying in Paris.
On leaving college in 1912, he founded the Edinburgh Group which exhibited for three consecutive years before the First World War intervened.
As a painter, Hutchison specialised in portraits and after the retirement of Sir James Gunn assumed the mantle of Scotland’s premier society portraitist.
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh owns five of his works including a study Of the Queen dating from 1956.
The BBC owns another portrait of Her Majesty also from 1956 and Huchison painted Prince Philip in the late 1950s.
One of these is owned by the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, and one by the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom. His well-known portrait of the novelist Dorothy. L. Sayers hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.
The painting to go to auction will be sold at Bonhams annual Scottish Sale on April 12. It has an estimate of £30,000-£50,000.
Bonhams Head of Scottish Art, Chris Brickley, said: “Sir William was a pillar of the Scottish art establishment – Director of the Glasgow School of Art from 1933 to 1943 and the President of the Royal Scottish Academy during most of the 1950s – but he also was a very fine artist.
“His works rarely appear at auction and I expect his portrait of the Queen to attract considerable interest.”
Hutchison, who was an Honorary Royal Academician, was knighted in 1953 and died in London in 1970.
Bonhams’ annual Scottish sale is now in its 17th year. It will feature works by leading Scottish artists as well as a huge range of objects related to Scotland from highland dress and weapons to silver and glass.
The sale will take place at Bonhams Edinburgh saleroom over two days, April 12 and 13.