January 27, 2025
Provided image/CHRISTIE'S IMAGES LTD. 2024
Experts estimate this John Michael Rysbrack bust of Benjamin Franklin was created between 1757 and 1762.
History buffs and art collectors will soon have the chance to bid on one of the earliest portraits of Benjamin Franklin.
Christie's plans to auction off a bust of the Founding Father, created sometime between 1757 and 1762, early next month. The piece is the work of Flemish artist John Michael Rysbrack, a highly regarded portraitist in 18th century England. He created 16 of the monuments in Westminster Abbey, including the sculpture of Isaac Newton.
While Rysbrack's bust is not the oldest image of Franklin – an oil painting by American artist Robert Feke predates it – it is believed to be the earliest sculptural portrait of the inventor and diplomat. Both the artist's and subject's names are chiseled into the back of the bust. Christie's expects it to fetch between $200,000 and $300,000 when it heads to auction on Friday, Feb. 7.
The sculpture had fallen off the grid for centuries when it was rediscovered in the 1980s. A pub owner from Yorkshire, England, had inherited the sculpture from a neighbor but never realized the significance of the bust until he had it appraised. It was sold through Christie's in London in 1986. It changed hands again in 2014 through a Sotheby's auction.
The first known owner of the bust, however, was a friend of Franklin's. Antique experts have traced the piece back to Benjamin West, a Swarthmore-born artist who worked across colonial Pennsylvania before relocating to England. He likely used the Rysbrack sculpture as a reference for his own unfinished painting of Franklin and the other negotiators of America's peace treaty with England. West later dramatized Franklin's discovery of electricity in a painting that now hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
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