A painting by L.S Lowry that was lost to the art world for seventy years has been sold at auction for £2.65m

The 1943 work, entitled The Mill, Pendlebury, depicts workers enjoying a day off and children playing cricket and was unearthed last year Pendlebury was found in the home of Manchester scientist Leonard Hamilton after he died.

It had been given to the family who later moved to New York and took the picture with them

Dr Hamilton bought the painting in the early stages of Lowry’s career and hung it in his room while studying medicine at the University of Oxford.

The piece then travelled to New York with Dr Hamilton who, through his work at the Sloan Kettering Institute, went on to develop a technique for extracting DNA.

The rich DNA samples created by his technique allowed Maurice Wilkins of King’s College London to generate the X-ray crystallography images from which went on to reveal DNA’s double-helix structure.

The sale more than doubled its estimated price which had been set at £1m by the art dealers Christie.

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