The long-running saga of an 18th-century bust by Edme Bouchardon, once found propping open a garden shed, is still unresolved. Two years after Scotland's Highland Council was given permission to sell the work for £2.5 million, or about $3 million, to fund public programmes, the sculpture remains without a buyer.

The council bought the bust for £5 in the 1930s, then lost track of it before recovering it in the 1990s. In 2024 it was cleared to sell the work, but the Invergordon Naval Museum and Heritage Centre, which wants to keep it in the area, has struggled to raise the purchase price after being refused heritage grants, according to the BBC. A representative of the museum criticised the council for rushing to sell off a shared public asset.

The museum now has until December 1 to find the money. If it cannot, the bust could be offered to buyers overseas, taking it out of the Scottish Highlands altogether. The case has become a focal point for arguments about whether cash-strapped local authorities should be allowed to sell artworks from public collections.

For now the bust, made by one of the leading French sculptors of the 1700s, sits in limbo between a council eager to realise its value and a small museum fighting to keep it in the community where it spent much of the last century. Heritage grant bodies have already turned down the museum's applications, and if the December deadline passes without the money, the work could be offered to overseas buyers and leave the region altogether.