British Family Thought Their Marble Bust Was a Garden Ornament. It’s Actually a 170-Year-Old Art Treasure

The lichen-covered ornament turned out to be a rare work by a pioneering American sculptor.

16 Sep 2026, 22:07 by Tibi Puiu · ZME Science

The rare sculpture spent more than 70 years unnoticed in a family garden before it was cleaned and identified. Credit: Chorley’s Auctioneers

For more than 70 years, she stood among the flowerbeds of an English garden, slowly disappearing beneath a coat of lichen.

The owners of the Cotswolds house assumed the bust was a decorative object made from reconstituted stone. Old family photographs show it outside as early as the 1950s, overlooking the garden while children and ponies posed nearby. It is a beautiful bust that almost anyone would love to have sit in their garden, but they didn’t make much more of it.

Then Thomas Jenner-Fust, a director of Chorley’s Auctioneers, visited the property for a routine valuation and took a closer look.

Beneath decades of weathering was marble. That alone made it instantly more interesting. But then the evaluator came across a name carved into its back: Harriet Hosmer.

Turn out this is a sculpture that was made in Rome in 1854. It’s an exceptionally rare version of Daphne, one of the earliest works by Hosmer, a pioneering American sculptor who built an international career at a time when women faced formidable barriers to becoming professional artists.

Chorley’s Auctioneers offered the newly identified bust at auction on Sept. 15 with an estimate of £12,000 to £18,000. Its auction catalogue entry records it as a 69.5-centimeter marble signed “Me Fecit Romae” — part of an inscription meaning “Harriet Hosmer made me in Rome.”

“They had no idea it was marble, no idea who it was by, and no idea it was so valuable,” Jenner-Fust told the BBC.

A Sculpture Hiding in Plain Sight

The bust bears the Latin inscription “me fecit Roma,” meaning “made me in Rome.” Credit: Chorley’s Auctioneers.

Hosmer, born in Massachusetts in 1830, moved to Rome when she was 22 and studied under the prominent British sculptor John Gibson. This was a pretty big deal and speaks volumes about her talent since women at the time had limited access to formal artistic and anatomical training. Whatever Hosmer showed Gibson, he must have been very impressed to take her under his wing.

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She ultimately became one of the most successful American sculptors working in Rome.

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“She was somebody who was exceptional — a real trailblazer and a feminist icon,” Jenner-Fust said.

Daphne is from the beginning of that career. Hosmer modeled the work in 1853 and had it carved in marble the following year. The North Carolina Museum of Art calls it her first independent work.

In Greek mythology, Daphne flees Apollo’s unwanted pursuit and escapes him only by transforming into a laurel tree. Artists had depicted the story for centuries, most famously in Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s impressively kinetic sculpture Apollo and Daphne, completed in Rome between 1622 and 1625.

Apollo and Daphne by Bernini. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Hosmer chose a more restrained, classically Roman representation. Daphne lowers her head as laurel leaves gather beneath her. Hosmer described the figure as “just sinking away into the laurel leaves,” according to the North Carolina museum.

From Lichen to a Museum Rarity

Black-and-white photographs from the 1950s show the sculpture standing among the garden flowerbeds. Credit: Chorley’s Auctioneers.

The bust is especially striking because so few marble versions are known. Surviving pieces include other examples at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the North Carolina Museum of Art and Washington University in St. Louis.

Decades outdoors did leave their mark. Chorley’s reported a roughly five-inch hairline crack in one arm, a small chip and dark spotting left by lichen. A conservator removed the biological growth, treated the surface and applied protective microcrystalline wax without carrying out deeper restoration.

How Hosmer’s Daphne reached this particular English garden remains uncertain. The family believes an ancestor may have bought it at auction around the middle of the 20th century.