A MOORS property may be hiding a lost painting by a Renaissance master that could be worth more than £1m.

Woodlands Farm, in Rosedale near Pickering, is on the market for £500,000 and could be housing a painting by the Renaissance master Sebastiano del Piombo, a friend and protégé of Michelangelo.

The painting, ‘Christ and His Cross’, was acquired in 1930 by a former owner of the farm in Rosedale near Pickering, who was an eccentric retired cloth merchant called George Baxter.

The Dutch State University of Art pronounced the work as genuine and valued it at £25,000 at pre-war prices.

It is now thought to be worth more than £1m.

Mr Baxter, known as the 'Hermit of Rosedale', put the painting on display for three weeks in 1933 at Middlesbrough Library and it has barely been seen since.

When he died in 1959, he was believed to have left it behind at Woodlands Farm.

The property’s current owner, solicitor Nick Finlayson-Brown, enjoys the legend of the painting although he admitted his wife was sceptical that the work remains within the farm’s walls.

"Whether it is there or not we don’t know, my wife thinks it’s a load of rubbish, but it is a true story and nobody knows where the painting has gone," he said.

“We didn’t know about it when we bought the cottage that that was the case, but the builders were quite keen to punch holes in the chimney breast and go into the loft and tear the loft apart, in the nicest possible way.”

Mr Finlayson-Brown believes the painting would be worth more than £1m in today’s market and says that although he never actively searched for it, the painting was at the back of his mind whenever renovations were carried out at the property.

He joked: “All the builders are still around, none of them disappeared to the Bahamas.

“We often thought about the painting but we don’t know that it’s there.”

And when asked how he would feel if the new owner of Woodlands found the valuable work, Mr Finlayson-Brown said: “I would take my hat off to them but I would be absolutely gutted.

“I would say fair play though.”

Valuable painting notwithstanding, Jack Ayres-Sumner, of estate agents Boulton and Cooper in Malton, says the property is an attractive proposition in the heart of the Moors, with potential as either a permanent residence or holiday home.