A Victorian oil painting originally owned by a Bradford mayor and mill owner and then sold by his family shortly after his death for the equivalent of £14.70 is now up for sale again and this time it is expected to fetch more than £1 million.

The picture, The Japanese Scroll, is by the French artist James Jacques Joseph Tissot and it was originally owned by Isaac Smith.

He died aged 77 in 1909 and two years later his executors sold his Tissot painting at Christie’s in London for 14 guineas.

Now, nearly a century later, the picture is to be auctioned by Christie’s at the Rockefeller Plaza in New York on October 22 when it is expected to fetch between 1.5 million and 2.5 million dollars.

Deborah Coy, head of Nineteenth Century European Art and Orientalist Art at Christie’s in New York, said: “The Japanese Scroll is not only exquisite in its detail and brilliant palette, but it is in pristine condition. Rarely does a panel of this size (it is fractionally bigger than 15ins by 22ins) survive in such excellent state.”

Isaac Smith was Mayor of Bradford between 1883 and 1885.

His father, John Smith, founded Fieldhead Mills, which later became part of the Illingworth Morris Group and in 1891, Isaac bought Allerton Mills, where he was a spinner of mohair and alpaca.

In 1893 he was chairman of the syndicate which bought the then ailing Salts Mills, founded by Sir Titus Salt.

When he was Mayor of Bradford, he helped raise £18,000 – a considerable sum in the 1880s – to build and furnish a hospital wing in Bradford.

He regularly attended Trinity Baptist Chapel in Horton Lane and was one of the first people in Daisy Hill to have a telephone installed.

His Ilkley-born great grandson, Tony Smith, a retired chartered accountant now living on the Isle of Wight, said: “He enjoyed collecting paintings. art, gardening and music were his main interests.”

Tissot’s most valuable picture, Le Banc de Jardin, set a new world record for his work when it was sold for £3,345,470 at Sotheby’s in New York in 1994.

BBC TV Antiques Roadshow expert Christopher Wood, said: “Tissot is best known for his brilliant pictures of English and French society in the 1860s and 1870s, depicting in minute detail the ravishing costumes, decorative interiors and riverside scenes of the period.

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