Lost marble bust used as doorstop set to be sold for £2.5mn

A rare marble bust found being used as a doorstop is set to be sold for as much as £2.5million pounds after a court greenlit its auction to help fund local projects.

Sotheby's has already received a huge bid for the sculpture bought by the council for just £5 - and years later rediscovered propping open a shed door in Scotland.

Highland Council hopes the sale of the statue of Sir John Gordon will help finance Invergordon Common Good Fund, investing money into the town and local area.

The council bought the statue of St John, an MP whose family owned land in the Highlands, some 200 years after it was sculpted in 1728 by Edme Bouchardon, a French artist whose work still lines the gardens of the Palace of Versailles.

The bust was thought to have been misplaced before turning up in an industrial estate in Balintore in 1998. After years of heated debate surrounding its potential sale, Highland Council was finally given permission to look for a buyer.

As the bust is a Common Good asset, the council was required to conduct a public consultation in order to inform any decision over selling the bust.

Today the council applied to Tain Sheriff Court for approval to sell the bust under the terms of the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973.

Read More

The £2.5million doorstop: how precious marble bust was used to prop open shed door before being discovered

The planned sale will now be subject to The Waverley Criteria which are used to decide whether an object should be considered a national treasure and not leave the UK.

Its sale is a contentious decision, after several years of back and forth. In 2014, a row broke out over ownership of the bust.

SNP MSP Rob Gibson said he believed the work to be a community asset belonging to the Invergordon Common Good Fund, backing a claim by locals that the bust was left to the town in the 1920s.

'We need to establish first of all who actually has the right to it,' he said at the time.

'If Highland Council is acquiring assets from local communities and then considering selling them and keeping part of the proceeds then it isn't respecting the rights of local communities.'

'Local people are strapped for cash too and I'd be looking for Invergordon to get 100% of the proceeds if indeed the local community wants to sell the Sir John Gordon bust.'

Highland Council said that it owned the scultiple. 

A spokesperson said at the time: 'The bust was initially thought to be under the control of Invergordon Common Good.

'However, after investigations, there are no records that it was ever gifted for the wellbeing of the people of Invergordon and therefore it is not currently considered as part of the Invergordon Common Good Fund.

Highland Council, which has a role in looking after the artwork, has since held discussions with specialists to progress the sale, which will after all benefit the Invergordon Common Good Fund.

The fund provides grant assistance to projects in the town and surrounding area.

Members of the Black Isle and Easter Ross Area Committee decided in May to recommend to Highland Council that the bust be sold.

This proposal was rubber stamped at a meeting of the full council in June.

Councillor Maxine Smith, who found the statue in 1998, said then that interest on the money made from the sale could be as much as £125,000 a year and this would be invested in the community.

Under the plans, a museum-quality replica would be commissioned for display in the Highlands.

The decision followed a public consultation, which sought the community's views on its sale, which received almost 70 responses, and 48 were in favour of selling the sculpture.

Sir John was an MP whose family owned land in Easter Ross and also gave their name to the town of Invergordon on the Cromarty Firth.

Bouchardon created sculptures for the gardens of the Palace of Versailles, the former home of French royalty, and also made the Fontaine des Quatre-Saisons in rue de Grenelle, Paris.

It was sculpted in the early 18th century while the artist was resident in Rome and Sir John was on his Grand Tour. 

About 200 years after Bouchardon made his sculpture, it was bought by Invergordon Town Council for £5.

The bust has been in physical possession of Highland Council for over 60 years, but precise ownership details were not clarified until 2019 from Invergordon Town Council minutes.

It represents an 'innovative creation' in a style which wouldn't be more widely seen until the latter part of the 18th century and has been described by experts at Sotheby's as being, 'brilliant in execution'.

It was then thought to have been mislaid and lost during local government reorganisation before it was rediscovered being used as a door stop for a shed in an industrial estate in Balintore, near Invergordon, in 1998.

In 2016, the bust was exhibited at The Louvre in Paris and the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.