Art lovers are being offered a slice of North-East history when a painting comes up for auction next month.

The portrait of squire Robert Charles Duncombe Shafto, the great-grandson of one of the region's most colourful characters, Bobbie Shafto, also offers an intriguing glimpse of the family home near Spennymoor, Country Durham, before it was destroyed by fire in the late-19th Century.

It is being sold on September 23 by auction firm Anderson and Garland, which believes a building in the background is Whitworth Hall as it looked in the days when the song which made "Bonnie Bobbie" famous was first written.

Robert Charles is shown aged about five alongside a Burmese pony. Behind him is the centuries-old hall, looking much as it did when Bobbie was born there 110 years earlier.

John Anderson, the firm's picture specialist, said: "According to Dodd in his History of Spennymoor, published in 1897, a portrait fitting the description of the one in our sale once hung at Whitworth in the company of several other family portraits, including one of Bobbie by Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy.

"Robert Charles was born at Whitworth in 1842 when the hall, which dates back to 1183, still looked much as it did when his great-grandfather was born there 110 years earlier.

"But a disastrous fire swept through the building when Robert Charles was 50, and it was rebuilt much as we see it today."

Published: 02/09/2003