A VICTORIAN oil painting once owned by a wealthy Accrington businessman has sold for almost £250,000.

The art, once owned and treasured by Colonel John Hargreaves, whose family owned the Broad Oak Printworks, fetched nearly double the expected £125,000 at Sotheby’s in London on Wednesday.

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Titled Catarina, it was painted by Lord Leighton in 1878. Experts said it could sell for between £100,000 and £150,000 – but it went for £233,000.

A spokesman for Sotheby’s said: “Catarina depicts an olive-skinned Italian model dressed in traditional Campagna-smock shirt,with amber beads at her throat and jasmine flowers in her hair.”

Scarborough-born Frederic Leighton painted the picture in 1878. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1879. He died three weeks after becoming the first artist to be made a Lord in 1896.

Colonel Hargreaves’ family once employed hundreds of people from Accrington at Broad Oak Printworks, which was the largest firm of calico printers in the town.

At different times, Col Hargreaves, born in Accrington on August 30, 1839, lived at Ormerod House in Burnley, and Whalley Abbey.

He also owned a mansion at Maiden Erleigh, near Reading, in Berkshire.

At Westminster Abbey, on September 15, 1880, his nephew, England cricketer Reginald Hargreaves married Alice Liddell, who was the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s book Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland.

Col Hargreaves died aged 56 on October 3, 1896, and the painting was sold at Christies the year later for 231 guineas – £242.55 today.