Albert Chevallier Tayler

In 1906 Kent won cricket's County Championship for the first time, and at the suggestion of the club's chairman, Lord Harris, a former England captain, the committee had the season commemorated in paint. The commission went to Albert Chevallier Tayler, himself a keen cricketer. He took separate sittings with each Kent player so the faces would be right, and finished the big canvas in 1907. It shows a match against Lancashire at Canterbury, with the slow left-arm bowler Colin Blythe delivering to Lancashire's Johnny Tyldesley. The other batsman at the crease, William Findlay, had not actually played in that game.

Tayler came to sporting pictures from somewhere quite different. He had spent more than a decade among the Newlyn painters, the colony in a Cornish fishing village who worked outdoors in the French manner, before moving to London around 1900 for society portraits and pageant-like history scenes. In 1905 he painted a dozen watercolour portraits of famous cricketers, which the soap maker William Lever turned into advertising lithographs.

Kent paid him 200 guineas. In 2006 the club sold the painting at Sotheby's for £680,000, and the buyer, a private art foundation, lent it to the MCC, the club that owns Lord's, where it hangs in the Long Room of the pavilion.