A portrait of a young girl that some believe is the only known painting of English novelist Jane Austen has failed to sell at auction.

Christie’s says no one offered the owner’s minimum price for the painting that had been expected to fetch between $US400,000 and $US800,000.

A spokeswoman for the auction house says the minimum level was kept secret.

The portrait by English society artist Ozias Humphry was put up for sale by Henry Rice, a distant relative of the writer of classics such as Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice who died in 1817.

Rice has said the sale of the work, which some experts have said does not depict Austen, had stirred up controversy.

In 1948, a leading Austen scholar dismissed the authenticity of the portrait, saying the style of costume the subject wears does not match the date.

But Rice and his family have said they never doubted the girl wearing a long white dress and carrying a parasol was their ancestor.

The painting is thought to date from 1788 or 1789 when Austen would have been about 14.

Rice had the painting examined by academics including Austen scholar Claudia Johnson at Princeton University, and they supported the original attribution and subject matter.

“The painting had rather fallen into the abyss,” Rice told Reuters in an interview last month.

“So I decided to take up the challenge and found that many of the arguments against the painting [being of Austen] were extremely weak.

“Effectively they were calling us liars. Then we really started a bit of a crusade.

“We were lucky in the people we met, including quite a lot of Americans, and the thing gathered strength, but there was fierce resistance and there probably still will be.”

He offered the painting to the National Portrait Gallery in London several times, but officials there turned it down because of doubts over its authenticity.

“So we decided to take it to America where it has more friends,” he said.

Christie’s auctioneers say they were sufficiently sure of recent research to go ahead with the sale.

A 27-year-old student from London has been awarded the Nationwide Mercury art prize at a ceremony held in Covent Garden.

Mark Melvin, who is studying at Central Saint Martins in the capital, won the award for his installation piece Applause, securing a £5,000 prize.

DJ and TV presenter Lauren Laverne was on hand to announce the winner and the artwork will now grace the cover of the 2007 Nationwide Mercury Prize compilation CD, which is released in August.

Mr Melvin studied as an undergraduate at Glasgow School of Art before moving to London. He said the award will ‘make a huge difference’ to his career as an artist.

‘This is the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me. I am completely overwhelmed to win this prestigious prize and be recognised in this way,’ he added.

Other artists picking up the £1,000 highly commended awards included Rachael Clewlow from the University of Newcastle and David Sullivan and Tamara Dubnyckyj, from the Royal College of Art.

David Rankin from Manchester Metropolitan University and Clare Dorsett from the University of Brighton also won the £1,000 award.

Sir Peter Blake, an artist on the judging panel, said: ‘The art here is from students from all over the country – it was a difficult task choosing the finalists.

‘This is a very impressive exhibition that highlights the outstanding quality of work coming out of British art schools and the ongoing relationship between music and art.’

Over 2,000 entries were received for this year’s art prize, including work from over 130 art colleges and universities.

After last year’s shocking exhibition of photographs of his father’s dead body lying on a mortuary slab covered in bruises, a New Zealand artist now exhibited his father Neville’s ashes.

Nigel Madden is competing in this year’s Norsewear Art Awards with this work. He says that in the end, his father, an alcoholic, is much more useful dead that he was alive.

The ashes are stored in a Belgium-made urn that Madden bought off the Internet and the plinth is handmade. I took my father’s ashes and placed them in a reflective urn and placed it on a pedestal. In this way my father’s remains function as a symbol and represent art, the author said.

Although his last year’s work “Three Portraits of Neville Madden” was the mourning of the dysfunctional father-son relationship, the artist claims that this year’s work, dubbed “The End of Art”, is less personal.

Madden quotes Picasso: “In art one must kill one’s father”. He liked the cold, reflective surface of the urn that ceases being important as an object and becomes the home of one’s own thoughts. He is also pleased with the ashes as material because it is not often that an artist gets to work with human mortal remains.

The work is up for sale for two thousand dollars, but finding a buyer is difficult.

The three photographs he displayed last year show his dead father on a mortuary slab, his body covered in bruises that he got after suffering a heart attack and falling off a bar stool in a hotel where he had been drinking before a rugby match.

The purpose of the photographs is not morbid in nature. Madden does not deem his conduct as immoral, but just raw and what it is because a dead body for him is just a shell. With the shocking photographs the artist wanted to depict something subtle, relationships. The photographs selected for the exhibition were marked with a warning sign for the audience.

The Norsewear Art Awards exhibition opens in hastings on New Zealand on April 14 and remains open until May 27. The winner of the award gets 20,000 dollars, and second and third contesters get 5,000 dollars each. This national annual award for modern art tries to discover and stimulate excellence in art. This year it is celebrating its 21^st anniversary.