THE SUTTON PLACE HERAKLES: A MASTERPIECE REDISCOVERED.

In 1854, the director of the newly created Berlin Museum, Gustav Friedrich Waagen, published the account of a visit he had paid in 1850 to Stafford House, the palatial residence of the 2nd Duke of Sutherland. This survey of British art collections had the purpose of completing his previous Works of Art and Artists in Great Britain and offering its readers a record of the artistic masterpieces kept in the country, including those in Buckingham Palace and public institutions such as the British Museum and the National Gallery.⁵ Most of the works recorded by Waagen at Stafford House were paintings from the Duke’s renowned collection, but he also considered a few antiquities to be worthy of inclusion. Indeed, ‘a bust of the young Hercules’ was noted to be ‘particularly valuable’.⁶

At Stafford House, the bust was displayed in one of Britain’s finest interiors, frequented by illustrious guests such as the young Queen Victoria, who famously remarked to the Duchess of Sutherland, ‘I have come from my house to your palace!’. Of the 2nd Duke’s painting collection, art historian Anna Jameson wrote: ‘The picture gallery at Staff ord House is […] the most magnificent room in London’, and the Duke’s youngest son described the house as an ‘Art Palace […] containing treasures of arts that few public collections could rival’.⁷ Nevertheless, the Duke remained staunchly attached to the principle of private ownership, and access to his collection was at first severely restricted until recommended visitors started being admitted on Saturday afternoons.⁸ Waagen himself had required two letters of introduction from the Queen of Hanover and the Princess of Prussia.⁹

From this point, the bust’s whereabouts become uncertain for a century.

Aiming to provide archaeologists and enthusiasts with a ‘more complete and accurate’ catalogue of ancient sculpture in British collections, German art historian Adolf Michaelis included a survey of Stafford House in his monumental study, Ancient Marbles of Great Britain. Mindful of the bust seen by Waagen, he couldn’t locate it: ‘the servant assured me [in 1877] that there were no other antiques in the house’.¹⁰ Moreover, he could not access the collections kept at Dunrobin Castle (‘I have only a communication from Edinburgh stating that the Duke of Sutherland possesses some antiques in Dunrobin Castle […] Such a collection would be the most northerly of all the antique collections in Great Britain’), and Trentham (‘One of the servants at Stafford House told me that there were a few antique bas-reliefs here’).¹¹ As Michaelis’s work was influential for generations of archaeologists to come, his inability to locate the bust was a great loss to scholarship.

At the time of Michaelis’s visit, Stafford House was occupied by the 3rd Duke of Sutherland, who is known to have had a certain interest in archaeology and sculpture.¹² Perhaps then the bust had been moved to Trentham, of which the gardens were described as ‘containing marvellous examples of antique sculpture’ or Cliveden.¹³ However, due to mounting political and financial pressures on their estates, the 3rd and 4th Dukes of Sutherland had to part extensively with their property. By 1912, Trentham Hall was demolished and Stafford House disposed of, and by the 4th Duke’s death, most paintings, sculptures and furniture from their extensive properties had been sold at auction.¹⁴ The whereabouts of the bust still remained unknown.

In 1918, the 5th Duke of Sutherland purchased Sutton Place, a Tudor manor house in Surrey. The subject of many architecture and landscaping articles, Sutton Place has been praised for the beauty of its gardens and as one of the first examples of Italianate architecture in Renaissance England. Built by a courtier of Henry VIII, Sir Richard Weston, whose son Francis was executed for being an alleged lover of Anne Boleyn, it boasts a rich history and a series of distinguished and artistically minded owners.¹⁵ It is also there that the bust was recorded for the first time in the twentieth century.

In 1955, Cornelius C. Vermeule published a brief survey of Sutton Place in his Notes for a New Edition of Michaelis: Ancient Marbles in Great Britain. This update to Michaelis’s work was intended to give a more recent catalogue of British collections following the destruction of many country houses, and included photographs of works which had previously only been known through sketches.¹⁶ At Sutton Place, Vermeule saw that ‘in the Library and on the top shelves over the book cases, there [were] six ancient busts. The most important [was] (no. 2) a bust of the young Herakles with lion’s skin over his head. This Pentelic marble head worked for insertion into a statue is an adaptation of a fourth century creation’.¹⁷ Five busts are faintly visible on an undated photograph of the library, giving us an idea of the display that may have been seen by Vermeule.

It is remarkable that unlike other antiquities in the Sutherland collection, such as the esteemed Trentham Lady, now kept at the British Museum, the bust survived the family’s successive auction sales. The bust must clearly have been prized. In 1959 the American billionaire and art collector J. Paul Getty acquired Sutton Place from the 5th Duke, who had told him how financially draining he had found the maintenance of the house to be. The bust is next sighted in a catalogue from 1966, Sutton Place and the Art Treasures of Mr Paul Getty, where it is prominently displayed, once again, in the library. Sutton Place became Getty’s principal residence, and after his death, was sold in 1980 to another American art enthusiast, Stanley J. Seeger.

Around 1983-1984, a small enclosed and seemingly abandoned side garden was tidied up. There, the bust of Herakles, which was half-buried in the ground and hidden by the overgrowth, was fortuitously rediscovered. Seeger gifted the bust to its fi nder, who assumed it to be a nineteenth century artwork and used it to decorate various properties until February 2020.

What happened between 1966 and the bust's rediscovery is unknown. Its story is a perfect example of Michaelis’s description of antiquities in Britain: ‘they have been moved from one place to another, and in consequence have often found their way into remote and inaccessible hiding-places; indeed a certain number of specimens have been utterly lost sight of, so that only a happy chance can bring them back to light’.¹⁸