Estimated at £3 million, this bronze fetched £13.6 million instead

Pre-sale estimates put it at £2 million to £3 million. When the bidding closed at Sotheby’s in London, the Hamilton Laocoön had sold for £13.6 million ($18.1 million) — several times over its forecast, and the highest price ever paid at auction for a Neoclassical sculpture.

The life-sized bronze is a 19th-century interpretation of Laocoön and His Sons, the ancient marble group depicting the Trojan priest and his two sons battling giant serpents. That original was unearthed in Rome in 1506 and became one of the defining discoveries of Renaissance Europe, prized for its dramatic composition and anatomical detail.

Sculptures on this scale rarely reach the market, and this particular bronze had not been offered at auction for around 150 years, adding to the scarcity that drove bidding well past its estimate before a buyer in the Old Masters market secured it.

Its history traces back to Napoleonic-era Paris, where the ancient marble was taken under the Treaty of Tolentino and a plaster cast was made at the Musée Napoléon in 1797. British collector George Watson-Taylor commissioned a bronze from that cast, and French sculptor Auguste-Jean Marie Carbonneaux completed four monumental versions in 1817. Only a few survive — one in the French Parliament, one at Houghton Hall in England, and the Hamilton piece.

Watson-Taylor never paid for the commission, so the bronze was sold soon after completion. It passed through the hands of writer William Beckford, the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, and the Duke of Hamilton, before featuring in the duke’s 17-day Christie’s estate sale in 1882, where industrialist Thomas Merthyr Guest bought it. It stayed in his family for generations before this week’s sale.

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

Wikimedia Commons/by LivioAndronico