The ask makes Emanuel Philips Fox (1865-1915) who painted it, potentially a $A1.5 million commodity.
The profit could be as much as $A500,000 after expenses if a sale is achieved.
The dealership, Richard Green Fine Paintings, had not sold the painting at the time of going to press, but the large portrait has all the hallmarks of a serious sleeper of great rarity in the current sale room environment.
The work, a portrait of the wife of the artist Penleigh Boyd to whom Fox is believed to have introduced her, is a stunner as was the sitter.
It has been turning heads in the eminent position at which Richard Green Fine Paintings has hung her at the fair.
Other dealers, including Australian expat Adrian Mibus who owns Whitford Fine Art in Mayfair, had picked up on it but when the bids mounted it must have been evident that there was little point in pursuing the work to a potential stratosphere even if it were possible if bids with limits had been left
The Richard Green dealership has the reputation of being hard to beat in the regional auction stakes.
The fall in the Australian dollar against sterling has made it hard to compete for Australian paintings sold overseas.
But it also suggests a reversal of the fall in appreciation for Australian art that occurred a couple of years ago when a major exhibition devoted to it was held at the Royal Academy in London.
It is almost as surprising as the reversal of interest in Aboriginal art with Sotheby's devoting a sale admittedly to the traditional end of it.
The bidding also ran beyond the estimates of £120,000 to £150,000 which the auctioneers May et Associes of Roubaix had put upon it.
The dealership is also armed with some formidable research and a very sturdy provenance.
The pages given out to prospective buyers by Richard Green Fine Paintings at the fair made no mention of the auction and therefore whether the work had been purchased there or subsequently from others weeks later, so exactly what the gallery could make out of it was hard to pin down but as the late Sydney dealer Robert Webeck said when placed with explaining the worth of similar fantastic finds to his buyers " a piece of gold was a piece of gold whether it was bought from a bank or discovered in the ground."
Richard Green Fine Paintings's Jonathan Green coincidentally was also pictured in this week's London Guardian newspaper displaying a small previously unknown Monet pastel he had discovered taped to the back of one of two other Monets he had secured serendipitously in France in 2014.
The work came by descent from Monsieur Albert Sonneville (1873-1951) of Roubaix who was a wool broker like Henri Noufflard in the 1850s. The wool trade, the French end of it in particular, has engaged in some notable acts of patronage.
Noufflard had S. T. Gill paint views of the interior of his house.
The 40 by 100 cm oil has the title on the reverse Blanche et Noir (black and white) and the work is being related to Nasturtiums which is the second most highly priced Fox at auction making $600,000
Nasturtiums was bought by the Art Gallery of NSW at Deutscher and Hackett for $600,000 in 2011.
The auction record, however, is held by Autumn which sold for $610,000 at Bonhams in November 1912.
The title of the find suggests Fox took the same direction in calling his works by the dominant colours, that is according to tones and effects rather than the name of the sitter.
The sitter, Edith Susan Gerard Anderson, who was a favourite model of Fox around 1912 when the work was painted, is wearing a white dress.
She was the daughter of John Anderson, Under Secretary for Education in Queensland and was also an artist, studying at the Slade School of Art.
She is also recorded to have taken painting lessons from Fox.
With her marriage to Boyd she entered a prominent Australian artistic dynasty and coupled with a man who was involved in leading exercises in marketing inverse as art in Australia.
Anderson also appears in The Arbour of 1910 in the National Gallery of Victoria, which depicts a lady in white listening to a little girl reading.
The portrait is very much at home in a fair, redolent with images of ladies in long dresses, which is being held at its usual abode in a marquee (fancy big tent) in the grounds of The Chelsea Pensioners Hospital in London.
The Masterpiece fair has assumed some of the mantel of the Grosvenor House Antiques Fair which ended as an annual event in 2009.
Masterpiece appears aimed very much at the luxury brand and trophy market which now appears to be bubbling along with more fervour than it did even in the 1980s.
Low interest rates mean there is nowhere for money to be easily placed and the much written-about trend to wealth inequality suggests the nouveaux riches are being spent.
In line with the big offerings from the major auctions vendors appear to be very willing to sell into a market of highly affluent if occasionally slow and grudging buyers.
At Sotheby's Impressionist auction in London on June 24 two bidders competed on a Gustave Klimt painting and did so meanly that the sale took nearly five minutes.
The bidding went up in £100,000 instalments interrupted by occasional £500,000 jumps urged upon them by the auctioneer.
When one of the bidders fell out another took his place and did the same thing. This happened all the way from £10 million to £20 million.
Some observers walked out gobsmacked by the behaviour although the packed crowd gave a rousing ovation afterwards - possibly glad to express their appreciation that it was finally over.
The fair has drawn out both collector and designer trophies. The impending appearance at auction of Blanche et Noir was tweeted and it is understood to have been picked up by other members of the trade in London if not in Australia.
Fox through his travels overseas has been no stranger to arbitrage although his wife Ethel appears to have been numerically more productive.
Green has been a buyer of Australian paintings at provincial sales for several decades dating back at least to the 1970s when buying from the estate of the Preston squirearchy in Yorkshire led to comments that gold must have been struck in the county.
However the paintings took a while to clear which could very well not be the case with the Fox, if Green is prepared to become negotiable. Pretty models usually sell better than fat farmers, except of course in Holland. The Fox also goes with zeitgeist.
The fair preview magnetised many Aussie troopers including David Jaffe and James Broadbent with English client in tow and dispensing commissions among top furniture designers. Also spotted was Tim Goodman, Rupert Mace, an exhibitor who once worked for Goodman and is now a prosperous antiquities dealer, and John Hawkins, who has been close to Koopmans
Occasional pieces of Australiana could be found, such as Circe by Mackennal on the Fine Art Society stand at £85,000.
There are no paintings however by Rolf Harris on the stand of Portland Gallery which used to show some of the works the disgraced entertainer used to promote as his 'serious' art.
