FROM cricket’s spiritual home at Lord’s to biscuit tin lids and greetings cards, Chevallier Tayler’s view of the St Lawrence Ground has helped place Canterbury on the world cricketing map for almost a century.

Commissioned by the club’s general committee of 1906 to commemorate the county’s first ever championship winning season, the painting measures 44ins by 89ins and was completed in 1907.

The artist was paid 200 guineas for his work which rose to 250 guineas with royalties from the first re-print in 1908.

A graduate of the Slade School, Chevallier Tayler later became a full member of the Royal Academy of Art, where he exhibited 49 works up to his death in 1928.

Though a copy of the Kent versus Lancashire work hangs in the club’s Colin Cowdrey Stand at St Lawrence, the original is on loan to the MCC and has been on show at the Lord’s Museum since 1999 when spiralling insurance premiums on the work, which was then valued at £250,000, proved too expensive for the county to maintain.

Painted from the Nackington Road End of the St Lawrence ground with Canterbury Cathedral in the background, it portrays Kent’s renowned left arm-spinner Colin Blythe, in front of the newly-completed pavilion, bowling to England and Lancashire batsman Johnny Tyldesley.

There have been three limited edition re-prints of the Chevallier Tayler painting, firstly in 1908 when copies on India paper or Japanese vellum were signed by the artist and the fourth Lord Harris.

Colin Cowdrey, Les Ames and Sandwich-based cricket writer E.W. 'Jim' Swanton autographed re-prints which went on sale in 1990 for £150, while Mr Swanton also signed 100 Millennium limited editions in 2000 together with Lord Cowdrey and Matthew Fleming, who was then club skipper.