A painting of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s tent – complete with computers and uneaten chocolate biscuits – has gone on show at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

Gaddafi’s Tent 2011 by Stephen Farthing is valued at £17,000.

It has lyrics from the Billie Holiday song Strange Fruit, which is about lynching in the southern states of America, painted across the canvas.

The Libyan leader is not depicted in the painting, which shows a tent full of computers, other hi-tech equipment and some Kit-Kat biscuits with a row of fighter planes waiting to take off outside.

Col Gaddafi is well known for taking a traditional Bedouin tent with him on official travels, and in the past has set it up in front of the Champs-Elysées in Paris, the Kremlin gardens in Moscow and in New York and Rome.

Mr Farthing, who studied at St Martin’s School of Art in London, has shown his work around the world and in 2004 was commissioned to paint a mural at the stadium of the Cleveland Browns American football team and another at Villa Park for Aston Villa.

His oil painting of the Libyan leader’s tent is part of the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition in Piccadilly, central London.

The exhibition, which has been held every year since 1768, includes works by amateurs as well as established artists.

Among the artists showing work this year are Tracey Emin, Gillian Wearing and children’s author and illustrator Quentin Blake.

Works on show include a sculpture of a dog with its head in a bin, a hollowed-out tree trunk and a series of chairs piled on top of one another. The exhibition runs until August 1.

An essential part of the London art calendar, The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition is the largest open contemporary art exhibition in the world, drawing together a wide range of new and recent works by established, unknown and emerging artists.