38cm ostrich statue sold for £1,824,540. Taken from Facebook
A British family recently asked an auctioneer to assess the value of an ancestral heirloom and found that a 38-centimeter bronze statue of an ostrich came from the hands of Giambologna, a well-known Flemish Renaissance sculptor from the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and was finally bought by a British art collector for 1,824,540 pounds (about $2,567,580).
The Mirror reports that the ostrich bronze statue, created more than 400 years ago, was originally owned by politician and writer Horace Walpole, whose family sold it in 1842 to John Dunn-Gardner, the self-proclaimed Earl of Leicester, for the equivalent of £3,000 today. Dunn-Gardner’s children and grandchildren have passed the statue on to the present day. The descendants had no idea of the value of the statue until they asked the auctioneer to appraise it.
The auctioneer spent 2 years researching the work and found that the sculpture was one of the 3 most famous works of Giambologna. The other two works are in the collection of the Louvre in Paris and the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University.
The ostrich bronze statue was estimated at £8 to £120,000 before the auction, but the British collector sold it for 15 times more than expected after a 20-minute bidding session at the auction.
Auctioneer Millard (Martin Millard) said: “The owners hoped to get a good price, but they never dreamed the final sale price would be so high. It’s a life-changing amount of money for anyone.”
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