It took 150 years for The Hamilton Laocoön, a monumental bronze by Auguste-Jean Marie Carbonneaux, to surface, and only 15 minutes for it to be declared sold. That’s the power of art and auctions. The sculpture, inspired by the famous ancient Laocoön and His Sons, is one of the most celebrated works of Classical antiquity, with only four monumental bronze casts known to exist. Created in Paris in 1817, it has now become the most expensive Neoclassical sculpture ever sold at auction, fetching just over $18 million, almost seven times its $2.7 million low estimate, at Sotheby’s London Old Masters sales.
Bidders from across the globe showed keen interest in the monumental bronze, but the action unfolded in just 15 minutes, with four determined bidders battling it out before the final hammer fell. According to Sotheby’s, it was underbid by a contemporary art collector, while bidding also came from Asia. The final price also made it the second-highest ever achieved at auction for a pre-Modern sculpture.
Standing an imposing 234 cm high and 163 cm wide, the Hamilton Laocoön is even larger than the original Vatican marble. It depicts Laocoön, a Trojan priest, and his two sons in a desperate struggle against enormous sea serpents sent by the gods. Carbonneaux created the work using the then-innovative sand-casting technique, rather than the traditionally favoured lost-wax method. Yet what makes the sculpture truly remarkable is not just its mythology or technical achievement, but its extraordinary depiction of human anatomy, movement and raw emotion.
The Hamilton Laocoön was undoubtedly one of the standout lots of this year’s Old Masters sales, which once again brought together the auction world’s two biggest rivals. Sotheby’s evening sale of Old Master and 19th-century paintings and sculpture realised £37.8 million (including fees) from 45 lots, with 77% sold, according to The Art Newspaper. Christie’s equivalent sale the previous evening totalled £38.9 million, with roughly 90% of lots finding buyers. “The Hamilton Laocoön is a trophy, and the provenance places it in the ranks of some of the most important sculptures that have been offered on the art market,” Christopher Mason, Sotheby’s European Head of Sculpture and Works of Art, said before the sale. “In some ways, the story of this is as important as the object.”
