A $6 piece of marble that was used as a doorstop is actually a valuable bust of an 18th-century Scottish politician – and could be worth millions of dollars.
The “Bust of Bouchardon” — which depicts Scottish landowner and politician Sir John Gordon — was made by French royal sculptor Edmé Bouchardon in 1728 while Gordon was on tour in Rome, according to artnet.com.
For centuries it was kept in the family castle in Invergordon, a small town in the Scottish Highlands.
But the castle was sold in the 1920s and Invergordon Town Council won the bust at an auction in 1930, CNN reported.
Then the artwork disappeared for decades – until an eagle-eyed person spotted it in 1998 while opening the door of a shed in the nearby village of Balintore, said the media.
Apart from brief loans to the Louvre in Paris in 2016 and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles a year later, the piece has remained in storage because Highlands Council officials believe it would be too expensive to insure it if they exhibited publicly.
So on Tuesday, Tain’s Scottish Highlands Sheriff Court approved plans to sell the coin – and it could fetch the princely sum of more than $3.2 million, CNN said.
The Highlands Council already has one offer: an unidentified buyer who contacted auction house Sotheby’s last year and threw more than $3 million on the table.
But it is unclear whether the private buyer – who has also offered to pay for a museum-quality replica that could be displayed in Scotland – will get the piece if he lives abroad.
The relic will almost certainly be subject to a legal process to determine whether such items should be considered national treasures, the export of which is prohibited abroad.
All money raised from this operation will be sent to the Invergordon Common Good Fund, which provides grants for local projects, artnet said.
