A RARE painting dating back to 1918 fetched almost £50,000 at a Leominster auction.


Southwark, an uncommon mezzotint by Christopher Nevinson was sold for £47,000 to an American buyer who outbid seven others over the phone at the Brightwells auction last month.


The artist had previously been invalided from the western front where he worked as an ambulance driver and the painting is said to depict the grime, smog and claustrophobia of the industrial subject.


Paul Sandby’s watercolour of the Old Welsh Bridge in Shrewsbury was sold to a local private collector for £22,000 while an oil painting of a peacock and domestic fowl in the gounds of a country house was sold for £13, 500.


Six paintings were sold at the auction – which featured on-line bidding for the first time at a picture sale at Brightwells – and totalled just under £150, 000.