A TINY watercolour painting by an East Anglian explorer who accompanied Captain Scott on his ill-fated trip in search of the South Pole is expected to fetch up to £1,000 at auction.

A TINY watercolour painting by an East Anglian explorer who accompanied Captain Scott on his ill-fated trip in search of the South Pole is expected to fetch up to £1,000 at auction.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard's picture Sunset goes under the hammer at Bonhams in London on April 29.

It measures just six-and-three-quarter inches by eight-and-a-half inches and is signed by the artist and dated in 1933. Its guide price is between £700 and £1,000.

Cherry-Garrard lived to tell the tale of the ill-fated expedition of 1912, which claimed the lives of Scott and three of his fellow explorers.

He was assistant zoologist on the trip and accompanied Bowers and Wilson on the legendary trek to Cape Crozier to retrieve Emperor penguin eggs.

Cherry-Garrard was the youngest member of the team and was later part of the rescue party that found the frozen bodies of Scott and his colleagues.

The deaths haunted the explorer for the rest of his life as he was responsible for the siting of the food cache Scott just failed to reach.

He went on to write a book about his adventure called The Worst Journey In The World and retired to the Sudbury area, marrying Angela Turner, from Ipswich. He died in 1959, aged 73.

In 2000, a white bobble hat worn by Cherry-Garrard on the trip fetched more than £800 at an auction while his balaclava sold for £2,350 and his canvas sledging harness went for £4,112.

His old woollen socks were expected to fetch up to £4,000 but failed to find a buyer at the auction at Christie's in London.

Last month, 18 hardback Rudyard Kipling novels carried by Cherry-Garrard during the expedition sold for £1,200 at Olivers auctioneers in Sudbury.