<div><p>LONDON (Reuters Life!) - Royal heirlooms including a picnic set and a portrait painted by Queen Victoria go on sale at Christie's in London on Friday and are expected to fetch around one million pounds ($1.7 million).</p><p>The auction of around 200 lots is from the collection of Prince George, Duke of Kent and a son of King George V, and his wife Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, being offered by surviving members of their families.</p><p>The couple married in 1934, and eight years later Prince George was killed when his plane crashed into a mountain in Scotland while he was serving for the RAF.</p><p>His wife found herself needing to raise funds, and in 1947 Christie's held a three-day auction of the prince's property which raised 92,300 pounds and generated considerable public interest at the time.</p><p>The couple had three children -- Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, Princess Alexandra and Prince Michael.</p><p>Christie's will be hoping it can replicate the success of another royal auction in 2006, when its sale of works from the collection of Princess Margaret fetched 13.7 million pounds.</p><p>"People like the mystique of the royal family," said Edward Clive, director of Christie's. "Provenance is clearly important, and you can't get a better provenance than a royal family."</p><p>Items on display at Christie's headquarters in London range from a set of teaspoons valued at 100-200 pounds to a pair of French emerald and enamel ear clips by Cartier estimated to fetch 50,000-60,000 pounds.</p><p>In between is a chromium-plated picnic set belonging to King George V containing a thermos-flask, sandwich box and two teacups among other items and which doubled as a footrest.</p><p>One highlight is a portrait by Queen Victoria of her daughter Princess Louise as a young girl which she copied from a painting by Franz Xavier Winterhalter. The 1851 work is expected to sell for 10,000-15,000 pounds.</p><p>Louise appears again at the auction in the form of a 1915 portrait by Philip Alexius de Laszlo, and a bronze model of Queen Victoria, cast from a life-size marble statue based on a design by Princess Louise, is also on sale.</p><p>The auction includes photograph albums of the Russian imperial family that contain informal pictures of the last Czar, Nicholas II, playing tennis and at a hunt.</p><p>Princess Marina, the last foreign-born princess to marry into the British royal family, was the daughter of Grand Duchess Helen Vladimirovna of Russia.</p><p>(Reporting by Mike Collett-White; editing by Patricia Reaney)</p><img src="http://admatch-syndication.mochila.com/images/ad.gif?aid=63522116&bid=informcom" /></div><div id="copyright"><div>

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