DAMIEN HIRST’S most recent work, a bejewelled skull called For The Love Of God, sold last year for £50m. So how much will his acrylic painting of a dying crow fetch at auction?

The little-known work is possibly the oldest surviving piece by Hirst. He produced it when he was 18.

Its owner - a Yorkshire woman who was a schoolfriend of Hirst - is now putting the picture on sale. Given by Hirst as a present 25 years ago, it could now be worth a small fortune, possibly into six figures.

The woman, who has asked to remain anonymous, used to hang the painting on her living room wall but for the past decade it has been stored in a bank vault because of its presumed worth.

The untitled picture, which measures 2ft by 18in, is thought to be the earliest known extant work of Hirst unless, that is, his mother still has some of her son’s earlier teenage or childhood dabblings. The canvas bears Hirst’s signature and was painted on the kitchen table of a house in Leeds where Hugh Allan, his long-time professional partner, lived a quarter of a century ago.

At the time, Allan was sharing the home with the woman who now owns the picture. She and Allan were both just 20, and had left Allerton Grange Comprehensive in Leeds two years earlier.

Next door was a young artist from the same school: Marcus Harvey, whose painting of the Moors murderer Myra Hindley caused a storm when it was shown at the 1997 Sensation exhibition.

Hirst - yet another product of Allerton Grange - lived around the corner with his mother. The four hung out together “doing art and going to gigs”.

Last week the woman said: “Damien did the painting at the house I was living at in Leeds, just around the corner where he was living with his mum. He did it on the kitchen table, and simply said ‘here you are, have it as a pressie’.

“We then went off to a local jumble shop to get a frame. It was like quite a few of the other paintings he had done at school – full of blood, gore and horror.

“I could never bring myself to throw it away even though for years Damien himself was never famous. In fact I thought that of the two that Marcus was going to be more famous, but I may be a bit biased as I went out with Marcus for five years.

“Damien certainly always had this get-up-and-go, and was always even as a teenager very good at selling himself. It obviously stayed with him.”

The “blood, gore and horror” captured in the dying bird picture are features that have continued to fascinate Hirst throughout his art career.

Death has been a central theme, and in the 1990s he became famous for a series in which dead animals, including sheep, cows and sharks, were dissected and then preserved in formaldehyde. More recently he appears to have developed an obsession with skulls and the macabre.

Hirst’s friends from school speak of him with affection. He was awarded only a grade E in A-level art, but persuaded Leeds art college to accept him for its foundation course.

“Of course I remember Damien very well,” said David Wood, his former school art teacher, this weekend. “He was a naughty boy and pretty disruptive. His style then in both drawing and painting was very free, but I liked him. I also directed him in the school play in his last year. He was, appropriately, Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

It seems as if Hirst liked Wood too. As he was about to leave for Leeds college (he later went to Goldsmiths art college in southeast London), Hirst handed his teacher a book on the sculptor Rodin inscribed “Thanks for everything, Mr Wood”.

Wood always thought that Harvey, who did A-level art the year before Hirst, was going to be the bigger star.

Harvey, whose work, like Hirst’s, was also bought by the collector Charles Saatchi, has done well in his career. But the real winner from Allerton Grange has been Hirst.

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