A VICTORIAN oil painting of a Worcestershire girl feeding chickens is expected to sell for between £500,000 and £700,000 at auction on Wednesday.

The 1880s picture Feeding the Chickens features Bessie Osborne in North Littleton, near Evesham, and it is now regarded as the masterpiece of Walter Frederick Osborne (no relation), who became Ireland’s “most distinguished artist”.

It is set to fetch between £500,000 and £700,000 at Bonhams in London. If it sells for anything more than £748,000 it will set a new world auction record for a work by Osborne.

Charles O’Brien, head of 19th-century paintings at Bonhams, said: “Osborne was at the height of his career when he painted this picture. It is a highly desirable work by a very well respected and admired artist.”

According to the auctioneers Osborne set off for Worcestershire in the summer of 1884 with some fellow artists. He produced Feeding the Chickens – a 3ft high canvas – in October 1884.

In a letter to his father, dated October 12, 1884, he describes the subject of his painting as a “kit-kat of a girl” and the fowl as “troublesome”.

“The weather, I am sorry to say, has been bitterly cold the last week, so much so that my model nearly fainted and I had to send her home,” he writes.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Osborne was tall and athletic-looking, and a keen cricketer.

He died aged only 43, from pneumonia, on April 24, 1909, leaving 3,815 pounds, six shillings and ninepence in his estate.