A PAINTING by York-born artist Henry Scott Tuke is expected to fetch a third of a million pounds at a Christie's auction later this month.

That would represent a 10,000-fold increase on the price fetched by the work, Midsummer Morning, when it was sold in 1960 for only 35 guineas - £36.75 in today's money.

The 6ft by 4ft, 6ins picture, featuring five young men frolicking on rocks at a Cornish beach, was painted in 1908.

It is one of 361 Victorian paintings and works of art being sold by the multi-millionaire Forbes publishing family of America, which publishes the famous annual list of America's richest people, the Forbes Four Hundred. The collection is expected to fetch a total of about £25 million in a landmark sale lasting two days, on February 19 and 20.

Every aspect of Victorian art will be represented, with artists represented including Millais, Landseer and Rossetti.

Tuke, one of only four York artists who have ever been elected to the Royal Academy, came from a family of York Quaker philanthropists. One of them was his great-great grandfather William Tuke, a tea and coffee merchant, who founded The Retreat, the first home of its kind in England for the mentally-ill.

Henry was famous for his male nudes, often posed on sunlit beaches.

It has been said that his philosophy was simple: No Nudes is Bad News.

The curator of York City Art Gallery, Richard Green, said Tuke had won recognition in recent times as a great English Impressionist. The gallery had an early work by Tuke and a pastel, but did not have one of the famous nudes on beaches paintings.

He said it would be wonderful for the gallery to acquire the Midsummer Morning painting, and the gallery had acquired expensive paintings in the past.

But he said the short amount of time before the Christie's auction sale would make it extremely difficult to raise the necessary funding.

Updated: 10:09 Friday, February 07, 2003