THE hammer has come down on the final lot in Bolton Museum’s painting sell-off — which has raised hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The 36 artworks have been auctioned by Bonhams to raise funds for the museum’s new storage facility.

The final painting to be sold was Edward Wilkins Waite’s The Rising Moon, an oil painting which sold in London for £1,625, bringing the total value of the sale to £431,654. Bolton Council has to pay 20 per cent VAT on the sale, meaning they have raised £358,434.

While most of the works sold for between £1,000 and £6,000, the most expensive lot was was Robert Gemmell Hutchison’s Sea Gulls and Sapphire Seas, which sold in Edinburgh for £120,000 — a record for the sale of any painting by the artist at auction.

It was initially bought by the museum for £150 in 1912.

John Evert Millais’ The Somnambulist was sold to a buyer in New York for £74,400, while two works by Picasso, an etching, Peintre et Modele, and a lithograph, Le Picador, sold for £5,400 and £8,750 respectively.

Several works dramatically exceeded their estimates.

A sketch of King Lear by George Romney, which had been estimated as being worth £4,000, reached £30,000 before the hammer came down.

Edward Burne-Jones’s A Study of Danae and the Brazen Tower sold for almost three times its estimate, at £15,600, while Albert Goodwin’s Hastings, initially valued at between £10,000 and £15,000, sold for £26,400. It was initially reported that the paintings could sell for about £500,000 in total.

Stephanie Crossley, Bolton Council’s assistant director of adult services, said: “We have now seen all of the paintings go to auction and while the figure of £500,000 has been reported, we did not set ourselves a strict target of how much we anticipated raising. We have always maintained that the specifications of the new museum store would be worked up in line with the budget available.

“work has started on the new facility and we hope the project will be completed soon.”