Slave and Lion, a very rare work by Xu Beihong, a Chinese artist more renowned for his series of horse paintings, will be auctioned next month, Christie's Hong Kong said on Monday.

Christie's estimated that the painting could fetch more than HK$33 million (US$4.24 million), which would be a record for any of Xu's works.

According to the auction company, Slave and Lion is one of the very few pieces to have been found and that date back to the early 1920s when Xu lived in Berlin. Christie's believes the picture will attract much collector attention because of its unique subject matter, and it's an example of how Xu captured realism by combining a Western sense of form with Chinese line drawing.

The key figures in the painting are a slave and a lion and it is set in the Roman Empire. The slave who helped a lion, which had a thorn in its paw, meets the lion again, but this time in the lion's den in the Roman amphitheater where the lion was to tear him to shreds for the Romans' entertainment. However, the lion refused to attack the slave, which so moved the emperor that he granted the slave his freedom.

Slave and Lion goes under the hammer at Christie's 20th Century Chinese Art and Asian Contemporary Art Auction on November 26 along with about 400 other art pieces, including Tiananmen Square, a popular work by contemporary Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang.

(Xinhua News Agency October 24, 2006)