Keys, the Aylsham-based auctioneers, is celebrating its best-ever sale after an oil painting of a Mexican scene was snapped up by a bidder for �180,000.

The painting was put up for auction by a Norfolk family whose 19th-century forebears commissioned it, together with three others.

Called The Valley of Mexico, it was painted by British artist Daniel Thomas Egerton in 1838 and shows a panoramic scene with locals in traditional dress in the foreground.

It was sold in the auction room to an overseas dealer.

Egerton was one of the first travelling artists to arrive in Mexico after the country's independence in 1822. But in 1842 he met an untimely end when he and his wife were murdered by bandits in Tacubaya.