A painting said to be of Sir Sean Connery posing for an art class wearing only a thong is slated to go on public display soon. Robert Webster, known as Rab, painted the actor in 1951 while a student at the Edinburgh College of Art.
The previously unseen oil painting shows bare back of Sir Sean, now 80, with his head turned to one side and wearing a thong. Webster died last month aged 83, according to BBC News. The painting was made long before Dr No (1962) was to make Connery a film legend.
Nick Bihel, husband of Webster's niece Heather, found the painting among 500 works while clearing out the art teacher's old house in Selkirk after his death. Bihel said, "There were a few sketches of Sean Connery which are distributed among the family so to speak. The oil painting was part of a whole load of paintings just stacked on top of each other in a studio he used as a dark room. He never sold or exhibited any of his paintings but it is fairly obvious he was a very talented artist."
The exhibition is expected to include 50 paintings created by Webster between around 1945 and 1967, according to the Daily Mail.
Bihel told BBC: "He (Webster) said Connery treated it just as a job and that he didn't say very much. I have no idea how much the painting of Sean Connery would be worth. At the moment we are just taking stock of the situation but we would like to put them on display in Selkirk in the near future. Obviously some will have to be sold as there are just too many to keep them all."
The painting, incidentally, was made the same year that Sir Sean started work on the backstage of King's Theatre. It was also around this time that he took up bodybuilding as a hobby. He would make his film debut a few years later (in 1957).
