From a duke’s estate to a record sale: the bronze’s 200-year journey

Before it sold for a record £13.6 million ($18.1 million) at Sotheby’s this week, the Hamilton Laocoön passed through the hands of a writer, two dukes and an industrialist family over nearly two centuries — a journey that ended with the highest price ever paid at auction for a Neoclassical sculpture.

The life-sized bronze is a 19th-century version of Laocoön and His Sons, the ancient marble showing the Trojan priest and his sons struggling against giant serpents, unearthed in Rome in 1506. British collector George Watson-Taylor commissioned the bronze after a plaster cast of the marble was made at the Musée Napoléon in Paris in 1797, and French sculptor Auguste-Jean Marie Carbonneaux completed four monumental versions in 1817.

Watson-Taylor never paid for the commission, so the bronze went to auction soon after it was finished. Writer and collector William Beckford bought it, and it later passed to the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos and then the Duke of Hamilton, whose 17-day estate sale at Christie’s in 1882 sent it to industrialist Thomas Merthyr Guest.

The sculpture remained with the Guest family for generations, largely out of public view, until it returned to the market this week carrying a pre-sale estimate of just £2 million to £3 million. Bidding moved well beyond that range as several collectors competed before a buyer in the Old Masters market secured it for £13.6 million.

Only a small number of these Carbonneaux bronzes survive — one is housed in the French Parliament and another remains at Houghton Hall in England, alongside the Hamilton example that just changed hands.

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

Wikimedia Commons/by LivioAndronico