THERE’S a distinct whiff of barbarism in the way Scotland’s elected officials in the Highlands are behaving today.

The matter centres on the bust of Scottish aristocrat Sir John Gordon of Invergordon by French sculptor Edmé Bouchardon. It’s valued at over £3million.

It’s a work of great artistic significance. Created in 1728, it marks a break between the ornate, flamboyant baroque and rococo schools of art, and the new clean-lined coolness of neo-classicism.

Officials in the Highlands have been mistreating the bust for decades, and now they want to flog it off to some private overseas buyer.

It’s like selling the manuscript of The Waste Land by TS Eliot, a landmark of modernism, or Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon which ushered in Cubism.

Perhaps to some the bust of John Gordon is too austere, too glacial, too lacking in emotion. I’ve even heard some describe the sculpture as kitsch - which is entirely mistaken given it was a reaction against the overblown Baroque period.

Whatever your personal opinion of the work, though - or your feelings towards its subject matter - the piece is artistically and historically significant. It will be studied for centuries, and remain notable as long as humans appreciate art.

The piece was bought by Invergordon council in 1930 for £5. It’s around this time that the barbarism begins. The bust was to be put on display at the town hall but was mislaid.

Then in 1998, the bust was eventually found propping open a door in a Highland Council unit on a nearby industrial estate. 

You get the feeling that there’s some officials in the Highlands who would wipe their backside on the first edition of a Sir Walter Scott novel.

Once discovered, the bust went on tour at the Louvre in Paris and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. At least, the French and the Americans showed some respect to the work.

The Getty Museum describes Bouchardon as “instrumental in the transition from the........

© Herald Scotland