Ancient Venus rises to £8m world record

A marble statue of Venus 2,000 years old fetched nearly £8m at auction yesterday, a world record for an antiquity.

The statue, the centrepiece of one of the most important private collections of ancient sculpture in England, had been estimated to make between £2m and 3m.

There was fierce bidding between a telephone bidder and the floor of Christie's auction house, London, for the beautiful nude goddess. The successful bidder was not named. The sale ended an association stretching back more than two centuries between the statue, known as the Jenkins Venus after the flamboyant dealer Thomas Jenkins who sold it to the collector William Weddell, and Newby Hall, Weddell's family home near Ripon, North Yorkshire.

Richard Compton, a descendant of Weddell who owns Newby Hall, sold the statue to pay for essential repairs to the fabric of the house and its Grade I listed stables. "It is very sad that the Jenkins Venus had to be sold but at least my ancestors would be pleased that the proceeds from the sale today will go towards further vital restoration works at Newby and its heritage buildings," he said.

The Jenkins Venus was originally part of the celebrated Barberini collection housed in Palazzo Barberini, Rome, and was sold to Weddell in 1765 while he was touring Europe. The price was reputed to be the highest for any antiquity sent from Rome to England in the 18th century and might have been as much as £6,000. Weddell asked the architect Robert Adam to design a sculpture gallery for this and other works at Newby Hall. The work remained in its alcove while the house was passed through the generationsand it was this provenance that greatly increased its value.

The previous highest price for an antiquity was £7.7m for an Assyrian relief, known as the Canford Relief, in 1994.

Lord Bath is selling heirlooms worth an estimated £15m in a two-day sale at Christie's finishing today to fund repairs to Longleat, his estate in Wiltshire.

At Sotheby's yesterday, a portrait of Colonel John Bullock by Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88) fetched £2.6m, a world auction record for a work by the artist.