AN oil painting of an 18th Century Clitheroe MP is set to fetch up to £200,000 at auction.

The 8ft by 5ft portrait of Thomas Lister, who was MP for Clitheroe between 1773 and 1790, and who lived at Gisburne Park, Gisburn, is particularly valuable because it is by Sir Thomas Lawrence, one of Britain’s greatest portrait painters.

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His heyday was the early 19th Century, when he painted many of the leading personalities of the day.

The Lister family acquired the Manor of Gisburne in 1614 and Gisburne Park was built between 1727 and 1736 and remained the Lister family home for the next 200 years.

Thomas Lister was born in 1752 and was still only in his early twenties when he became MP in 1773.

In 1775, on the outbreak of the American War of Independence, he fitted out a frigate at his own expense, which he placed at the disposal of the government, and in 1779, fitted out a light-horse regiment known as Lister’s Light Dragoons.

In 1797, he became the first Lord Ribblesdale of Gisburne.

Sir Thomas, president of the Royal Academy and so-called Painter In Ordinary to King George III, painted the portrait of Lister, by this time Lord Ribblesdale, at around the time that Lord Nelson was killed at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.

On July 10, 1953, at Christie’s in London, the painting was sold by the widow of the fourth Lord Ribblesdale for £420.

It is now expected to fetch between £150,000 and £200,000 when it is auctioned at Sotheby’s in London next Wednesday.

Lord Ribblesdale died in 1826. When his great-grandson, the fourth and last Lord Ribblesdale, died in 1925, the family title became extinct.

In 1910, Laura Lister, younger daughter of the fourth Lord Ribblesdale and a great-great-granddaughter of Thomas Lister, married the 14th Lord Lovat, a Scottish landowner and chief of the Fraser clan.

They had two sons and two daughters. Their eldest son, Simon Fraser, who later became the 15th Lord Lovat, was a top British commando during the Second World War and distinguished himself during the D-Day Landings at Normandy in France on June 6 ,1944.

In the 1962 film The Longest Day, he was portrayed by the British-born American actor Peter Lawford, who was the brother-in-law of President John F Kennedy and a member of the Hollywood “Rat Pack” along with Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jnr and Dean Martin.

Gisburne Park, the Lister family home, is now a Grade I listed building and home of the BMI Gisburne Park Hospital. The 1,000-acre Gisburne estate was bought in the 1940s by Harold Hindley, a textiles magnate and one of the founders of British Home Stores.

It is now owned by his great-grandson, Guy Hindley, whose wife, Amber Meade, is an American film actress.

Sir Thomas’s polished style was influenced by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Five of his works are in the collection of the National Gallery.