Cousin of the Queen banks £6m, thanks to ‘tramp’ ancestor

PRISING a Renaissance masterpiece from the wall where it had hung for 100 years — and consigning it, for ever, to a gallery hundreds of miles away — might sound a rather bitter pill to swallow. But for the Earl of Harewood it has proved very sweet indeed.

For I can reveal that a full 11 years after the death of his father — the Queen’s first cousin, George Lascelles — the Earl has reached a settlement which not only means that the Government waives an inheritance tax bill of £3.4 million, but which sees his family coffers topped up by £5.7 million.

In return, he has bade farewell to what is understood to have been the only full-length portrait by the Italian artist Veronese in private hands in Britain. Until recently, Portrait Of A Gentleman Of The Soranzo Family was hanging in the magnificent, 77ft long gallery at the honey-hued Harewood House, the Lascelles family seat in West Yorkshire, sometimes described as the English Versailles.

‘It was in a spectacular, gilded, baroque frame,’ an admirer of the portrait tells me. But the frame does not seem to have been part of the deal struck with the painting’s new owner, the National Gallery. ‘They’ve hung it in a brown, dreary Renaissance frame — historically accurate but dull,’ adds the connoisseur.

That doesn’t trouble film and television producer David Lascelles, as the Earl is invariably known and whose credits include The Wisdom Of Crocodiles, starring Jude Law. He and the family are, I’m told, delighted that the Veronese is now in the national collection. Understandably, they’re also happy with the £5.7 million, which will be devoted to the upkeep of Harewood House, now run by a trust, and to a ‘ long list of conservation projects’. These were begun by Lascelles’s father, George, who auctioned £ 500,000 worth of ‘junk’ in 1987 — including an £83,000 Chippendale bed.

But it is to George’s father, Henry, that the family owes its current windfall — not because of his marriage to George V’s daughter, Mary, the Princess Royal, but because he spent an hour talking to a man dressed as a tramp.

This was his eccentric greatuncle, the unmarried 2nd Marquess of Clanricarde, shunned by the rest of the family.

When he died in 1916, he bequeathed millions to Henry who, three years later, bought the Veronese — for £1,750.