Missing for 150 years, this bronze just sold for £13.6 million

A bronze sculpture that had not been seen at auction in around 150 years just rewrote the record books in London. The life-sized Hamilton Laocoön, a rare 19th-century bronze interpretation of one of the ancient world’s most celebrated marble masterpieces, sold at Sotheby’s for £13.6 million ($18.1 million), comfortably beating expectations before the sale even opened.

Bidding had started with an estimate of between £2 million and £3 million. Several collectors pushed well past that range before a buyer entering the Old Masters market finally secured the piece. Once the buyer’s premium was added, the total climbed to £13.6 million — the highest price ever paid at auction for a Neoclassical sculpture.

The bronze is modelled on Laocoön and His Sons, the marble group showing the Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons locked in a struggle against giant serpents. That original was unearthed in Rome in 1506 and quickly became one of the defining discoveries of Renaissance Europe, admired for its dramatic composition and anatomical detail.

The Hamilton bronze’s own story began during the Napoleonic era, when the ancient marble was taken to Paris under the Treaty of Tolentino and a plaster cast was produced at the Musée Napoléon in 1797. British collector George Watson-Taylor later commissioned a bronze from that cast, and in 1817 French sculptor Auguste-Jean Marie Carbonneaux produced four monumental versions. Only a handful survive today — one sits in the French Parliament, another remains at Houghton Hall in England, and the Hamilton example took a far more complicated route through private hands.

Watson-Taylor never settled the commission’s costs, so the bronze went to auction just a few years after it was finished. It passed from writer and collector William Beckford to the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, and later to the Duke of Hamilton, before featuring in the duke’s celebrated 17-day estate sale at Christie’s in 1882. Industrialist Thomas Merthyr Guest bought it there, and it stayed with his family for generations, largely out of public view until now.

The Hamilton Laocoön was offered ahead of Sotheby’s evening sale of Old Master and 19th-century paintings and sculpture, which also included a recently restored early Rembrandt, Let the Little Children Come Unto Me (1627), that sold for £8 million, along with works by Edwin Landseer, William Hodges and Sandro Botticelli.

Wikimedia Commons/by LivioAndronico