ONE of the most valuable pictures ever painted by a Bolton born artist has been bought by a multi-millionaire American paper tycoon.

The Catskill Mountain House painting by Bolton born artist Thomas Cole sold for a record $1,463,500 (£845,954) when it was auctioned at Christies, in New York, on December 4.

The new owner of Cole's 19th century painting of the Catskills area of New York, where he lived after he emigrated from Bolton to the USA, has been revealed as tycoon Jonathan (Jack) Westervelt Warner.

Mr Warner bought the painting for his museum, the Westervelt Warner Museum of Young America in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to add to his collection of artwork that celebrates significant American historical events and figures.

The museum is already home to hundreds of paintings, sculptures, artifacts and antiques by world renowned artists such as John Singer Sargent, James Peale, James A. McNeill Whistler and Mary Cassatt.

Mr Warner said Cole is one of his favourite artists. He said: "I love his paintings. I bought Cole's Catskills Falls painting in 1970 and now that is worth probably about $15 to 20 million.

"I find looking at the Falls painting both spiritually and morally uplifting and I was even more delighted to get this painting."

Second World War veteran Mr Warner served as CEO and chairman of one of the USA's largest privately held forest product companies, Gulf States Paper Corporation, which was founded by his grandfather, for more than 40 years.

The museum was established in 2003 to display the majority of the 18th, 19th and 20th century art that Mr Warner has spent more than 40 years collecting.

He now has six of Cole's paintings.

Thomas Cole was born in Bolton in 1801, the seventh of eight children. He and his family emigrated to the United States in 1818, and he eventually settled in Catskills, New York.

He went on to became one of America's greatest landscape painters and was the founder of the Hudson River school of landscape painters.

In 1830 two of his pictures appeared in the Royal Academy and he made sketching tours throughout England, France and Italy, although those landscapes considered his best were painted in America.