The Highland Council in Scotland is ignoring local pleas and insisting on irrevocably severing Invergordonians and Scots from their past: the Council is ruthlessly selling an Edmé Bouchardon marble portrait bust of Sir John Gordon overseas for £3.1 million to finance the town of Invergordon's capital fund.

As the Trustees of the Invergordon Naval Museum & Heritage Centre have stated: "For nearly 300 years, this bust has formed part of Invergordon’s story ... It is not merely a work of art. It is a tangible link to the town’s origins and to Scotland’s eighteenth-century history. To dispose of it now — potentially beyond Scotland — would permanently sever that connection. Such decisions define how communities value their inheritance.”

We call on the Highland Council to immediately suspend the proposed sale of the 1728 marble bust of Sir John Gordon, M.P., Secretary of Scotland to the Prince of Wales and son of the founder of Invergordon. There is "a contractual agreement in place between the Council and the overseas buyer", with the buyer's identity, and their terms, remaining undisclosed. Once the bust is sold, however, the Highlands, and Scotland, will have been divested of this part of their heritage forever.

The portrait bust was sculpted by the distinguished French artist Edmé Bouchardon in Rome, and a new awareness of the bust’s historical importance, both local and national, to Scotland requires that the Council assume its role to champion our heritage, suspend the sale to this overseas buyer and set up a task force to keep the bust in the Highlands.

Why This Matters
In addition to being an exquisite, rare work of art (the first of two busts that Bouchardon sculpted of British aristocrats at a defining moment in the young artist’s aesthetic), this bust of Sir John Gordon is an intimate artefact of an important yet under-researched political figure in Scottish history having to navigate, both in youth and adulthood, the fraught terrain of loyalties between Walpole’s British government and Jacobitism.

Briefly, Gordon’s father Sir William was a Whig parliamentarian for Sutherland, later Cromartyshire, and bought the town of Invergordon in 1703, rechristening it. 

This bust of 1728 portrays Gordon just 18 years prior to Culloden, when Gordon sat for Bouchardon in Rome at about the age of 20. In a letter which still exists, the artist himself attested to Gordon’s prestigious social status in Rome, describing him as "a gentleman of the King of England".  Notably at that time, the exiled Stuart Court was maintained in Rome with the support of the Vatican. Thus, Sir John manifestly circulated amidst a charged cultural and political setting in which Hanoverian and Jacobean loyalists warily mixed and observed each other on their Grand Tour.

Back in Scotland, Sir John would inherit his parliamentary seat in 1742 and become Secretary for Scotland to Frederick II, the Hanoverian Prince of Wales, at a crucial moment: between 1745-51, thus including Culloden. Once again, he found himself caught between Hanoverians and Jacobites, this time in direct conflict, as the nation looked on.

The bust’s importance to Scottish history is both local and national, as demonstrated by the extraordinary decision of the UK’s Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest. Made up of 11 specialists, the committee unanimously determined the bust to be of outstanding historical importance to Scotland, of exceptional aesthetic significance within early eighteenth-century portrait sculpture, and of outstanding scholarly importance. Such unanimous determinations are rare, and place this object in the highest category of national cultural significance. 

Redress the Highland Council's Failure of Cultural Stewardship
The Highland Council has promised to “promote and enhance the Highland’s rich heritage and culture”, but this sale lets the whole of Scotland down. Last August, the Invergordon Museum's trustees announced an alternative plan for the bust, which has been ignored.  They are asking the Council to halt this sale of a masterpiece held in trust for the people of Invergordon and consider the alternative plan to prevent it being lost to the area and to Scotland forever. Indeed, in ignoring local opinion, and that of the most informed cultural specialists in Britain, including the Minister of Culture, the Council is demonstrating its wilful ignorance of and indifference to our material history, betraying our trust in it as custodian of our culture and heritage.

By rights, the bust should be featured in exhibitions confronting historical connections between Culloden, Inverness, and Invergordon during and after the uprisings. The bust could also help to illustrate the evolution of Scottish and British portrait sculpture. Nowhere, however, will the bust be more meaningful than in the Highlands of Scotland. Its place, its history, is here. We call on the Council to suspend the sale and set up a task force to keep the bust in the Highlands.