Loch scene sells for £121k

A 150-year old oil painting of skaters on Duddingston Loch has sold for £121,250, setting a new world record for a work by Edinburgh artist Charles Lees.

Before yesterday's auction at Sotheby's in London, experts predicted the 1853 painting Skaters, A Scene On Duddingston Loch, Edinburgh would sell for between 100,000 and 200,000.

Fife-born Lees studied under portrait painter Sir Henry Raeburn, whose iconic 1790s painting The Reverend Robert Walker Skating On Duddingston Loch hangs in the National Gallery of Scotland.

The previous world auction record for a painting by Lees was 11,500, which was the paid at Sotheby's at Gleneagles, Perthshire, on 2 September, 1998, for his picture Moonlit Scene in Yorkshire.