An oil painting by the renowned Bushey artist, Lucy Kemp-Welch, is set to fetch between £20,000 and £30,000 at an auction.

The three feet by five feet painting, The Approaching Storm, is coming up for sale at Bonhams in London on Wednesday, May 29.

Lucy Kemp-Welch was 20 in 1889 when she arrived in Bushey to become a student at the art school run by German-born artist Hubert von Herkomer.

She liked the village so much that she stayed there for the rest of her life, until she died, in hospital at Watford at the age of 89, on November 28, 1958.

She lived and worked at 20 High Street, Bushey. In 1901, she and younger sister, Edith, who was also an artist shared the house, named Kingsley, with their friend, Elizabeth Hart, a Glasgow-born artist; and their live-in servant, Bushey-born Edith Gotts.

In 1911, only Lucy Kemp-Welch and Elizabeth Hart were living at the house. Lucy never married and in the mid 1950s when she was in her eighties, she led a reclusive life.

She was only 26 when she exhibited her first painting, Gypsy Horse Drovers, at the prestigious Royal Academy in London in 1895.

In 1897 - the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee - she sold her painting, Colt Hunting In The New Forest, for £525 which was then more than a year’s salary for many people living in Bushey.

The Dublin Herald was so impressed with her work that on August 5, 1896, they said: "She is even now regarded as one of the best painters of horses the country has ever seen."

Publishers JM Dent liked her work so much that they commissioned her to illustrate a 1915 edition of Black Beauty. One day, in Bushey, a horse fell dead between the shafts of a cart and she quickly made a sketch of the corpse for future reference.

When Sanger’s Circus came to Watford, she was entranced and for several seasons she followed the circus, recording life behind the scenes and in the ring.

Auctioneers Bonhams say: "For her depictions of horses at work, in pursuit or at rest, Lucy Kemp-Welch is considered among the greatest British painters of equine life in the period straddling the turn of the last century.

"She dedicated herself to her art, studying her subject through exhaustive field sketches and oil studies, in every manner of location in order to hone her ability."

Bushey Museum owns several Kemp-Welch paintings, including The Jubilee Arch, Bushey and Bushey Church and Pond.

The current world auction record is £56,500, the sum paid at Christie’s in London on March 27,1997, for her 1937 oil painting, The Lumber Team.