An historic glimpse inside the Tsar's family album

An album of photographs of Tsar Nicholas II and his family taken six years before they were murdered by the Bolsheviks will go on sale in London later this week.

Entitled Scenes of Belovejhsk, the album contains 20 photographs taken during the annual visit to the imperial hunting lodge, in Poland, in 1912. Valued at pounds 3,000 to pounds 5,000, it is the highlight of a collection of items, illustrating the domestic life and wealth of the royal family, included in Sotheby's Russian Sale.

The photographs include one of Nicholas II leaving church with the Tsarina Alexandra, and their daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, all of whom, with the possible exception of Anastasia, were butchered at Ekaterinberg. Alexei, the Tsarevich, is not included in any of the photographs. A haemophiliac, he became very ill during the stay at Belovejhsk after a boating accident, and the Tsarina believed it was only the prayers of the "mad monk" Rasputin that saved him.

The coronation of Tsar Alexander II in 1856 is featured in a magnificent album of coloured lithographs and engravings, estimated at pounds 14,000 - pounds 18,000. The sale also includes a 1913 inventory of royal palaces which notes that the parquet floor of the Chinese Room at the Tsariskoe Selo palace was "so highly polished it was impossible to run on it", and how, when Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna, the Tsar's aunt, entered the room in summer, she would be handed a cut cucumber with which to wipe her face and refresh herself.