A WATERCOLOUR and ink painting of a Gwent village is expected to fetch up to £7,000 when it goes under the hammer at a leading fine art auction house next week.

The painting of Bedwellty near Blackwood by important British artist John Piper is included in Halls Fine Art's sale of pictures, silver and jewellery in Shrewsbury next Wednes-day.

The painting measures 15 x 21.5 inches and Halls Fine Art's paintings expert William Lacey says: "This Welsh mining village of Bedwellty is brought alive by Piper's characteristic swathes of colour and animated ink outlines." Piper, born in 1903 and who died in 1992, has 182 works in the Tate Collection alone, which range in style from etchings to abstract work in his later years.

His work focussed primarily on churches - he designed the new stained glass windows for Coventry Cathedral - and he spent much of his life studying the buildings he depicted.

Born in Epsom, he attended Richmond School of Art before being accepted by Royal College of Art in South Kensington.

He went on to join and exhibit with an elite English movement in modern painting that included Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Ivon Hitchens, Frances Hodgkins, Barbara Hepworth and Winifred Nicholson.

During the Second World War, he joined the government's War Artists Scheme and painted mainly derelict buildings or buildings that he anticipated getting bombed.

The sale also includes works by eminent sculptors Henry Moore and Joseph Gott and important artists Edward Seago, Juliette Peyrol Bonheur, William Mellor, Terrick Williams, Julius Caesar Ibbetson and Andy Warhol.