A David Hockney oil painting of a hedgerow which was owned until his death by the multi-millionaire Jurassic Park creator Michael Crichton, has fetched almost half a million pounds at auction in New York.

The three feet by four feet picture by Bradford-born Hockney, 72, titled Hedgerow, near Kilham, October 2005, is among 147 modern works of art, mostly pictures, collected and treasured by Crichton before his death, from cancer at the age of 66, on November 4, 2008.

It was bought for £447,635 by a mystery bidder, which was about £150,000 more than expected. A picture of Crichton by Hockney fetched £7,179 at the same auction.

Crichton’s whole art collection, including the Kilham painting and portrait of Crichton, is estimated to have brought in around £150 million at a two-part sale which started on Tuesday evening and concluded yesterday at Christie’s at Rockefeller Plaza, New York.

Crichton bought the Kilham painting at a Los Angeles art gallery. He knew Hockney (right) and had met him in 1976 in California when Hockney dashed off a drawing of Crichton, who later recalled: “David was living in the Chateau Marmont hotel (in Hollywood) and I came over one Sunday afternoon. He obtained a small stone and he drew me on the stone, while I sort of sat around. Often if you sit for David it’s a lengthy process, which I was not eager to do, so for him just to do a head was agreeable for me. He played opera constantly and chatted away and it was really terrific. Not only does he do this drawing, but he is extraordinarily amusing while he’s doing it.”

Michael Crichton’s best selling novels, including Lost World: Jurassic Park, Rising Sun, Disclosure and State of Fear, which later became Hollywood films, were so successful that Forbes, the American financial magazine, once estimated his earnings at more than twenty million dollars a year.

Harvard and Cambridge educated former physician Crichton was six feet nine inches tall. In 1994, he created the medical television series, ER.