ONE STEP AHEAD OF THE COMPETITION

THE value of antiques and works of art can be unpredictable at the best of times. When linked to a famous name or an important collector, no one knows where the bidding will stop. Macclesfield Cheshire auctioneers Adam Partridge catalogued this marble bust as “a late 18th/early 19th century French marble bust of Hercules wearing lion head cowl on turned circular socle base”. The estimate was £600-1,000.

The buyer, an international gallery, was one of 16 telephone bidders who believed otherwise. It sold for £320,000.

According to trade press, it was thought to be either Hellenistic or Roman, probably depicting Alexander the Great (356-323BC). The price was a house record for the saleroom.

A footnote in the sale catalogue added that the bust came from Sutton Place, Guildford, a Tudor mansion built by Sir Richard Weston, courtier of Henry III and purchased by the Duke of Sutherland in 1919.

Other owners of the house were John Paul Getty, at the time the richest man in the world, who purchased it in 1959; Stanley J. Seeger, American heir to a family fortune from lumber and petroleum whose collection of Picassos sold for $32 million in New York in 1993 and Frederick R. Koch, another reclusive American collector, who hung his paintings there but reputedly never spent a night in the place.

Speculation was that the bust was discovered during Seeger’s restoration of the property’s park and garden in the 1980s.