Robert Burns portrait on sale

A RARE portrait miniature of Scottish poet Robert Burns, which comes with a lock of his hair, was set to be sold at auction today.
The tiny gold-framed miniature, which measures only 5.5cm high, has been passed down through the Burns family and is engraved with the name 'Robert Burns'.
It was expected to fetch up to £700 at Bonhams auctioneers in Knightsbridge, London.
Very few images of the poet are known to exist, with the most famous, by Alexander Nasmyth in 1787, hanging in Edinburgh's Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
Camilla Seymour, head of portrait miniatures at Bonhams, said: "The individual features in the miniature are not dissimilar from those in the Nasmyth portrait, making the identification of the sitter plausible when the provenance is also taken into account."