Bronze statuette copy of the classical sculpture the Dying Galatian' (a Roman copy in marble after a lost Hellenistic original) in the Capitoline Museum, Rome. The statue depicts the slumped figure of a Gallic warrior, with a characteristic Celtic moustache, dying from a sword thrust to his right torso. He has fallen across his shield, sword, scabbard, and curved horn. The figure wears only the iconic Celtic twisted metal neck 'torc'. Several ancient writers record that Celtic warriors went into battle naked, their hair peaked with white lime, to demonstrate their bravery, although the depiction is also in accordance with classical representation of the heroic male nude. The bronze is incised 'A.MESSINA ROMA' to 1 side. The whole is mounted on an oval black, purple and white veined marble plinth (possibly an Italian variety of the Rosso marble group).

Almost certainly purchased by William Charles and Sarah Wentworth in Rome during their Italian travels in 1858-9, this statuette is a copy of the famed ‘Dying Galatian’, found at the Villa Ludovisi, Rome, in the early 17th Century, at which time it was described as a 'dying gladiator'. It is a Roman copy of a Hellenistic original from Pergamun in Turkey, part of a group commemorating the defeat of the Galatians (Thracian Celts) by Attalus I Soter (269-197BC). It then formed part of a considerable collection of ancient sculpture located in the Horti Sallustiani (the 'gardens of Sallust'), whence it was excavated. Miniature Roman copies have also been found.

Placed in the Capitoline Museum, the Dying Gaul was one of the 'must see' attractions of Rome for the Grand Tourist, and widely copied from the 17th to 19th centuries, both in full (e.g. at Syon House, Richmond, England and Wentworth Woodhouse, Yorkshire, England) or reduced scale in bronze, marble, bisque, or plaster. It features at the centre of Giovanni Panini’s capriccio 'Roma Antica - Views of Ancient Rome with the artist finishing a copy of the Aldobrandini wedding' (c1755). Its fame was even greater after the romantic evocation of its subject as a dying gladiator published in Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-18):

He leans upon his hand—his manly brow
Consents to death, but conquers agony,
And his drooped head sinks gradually low—
And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow
From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one...(Canto IV:140)

William Charles Wentworth’s Neoclassical taste (which at Vaucluse House was emmeshed with the Gothic and 'Louis' revivals) almost certainly stems from his English public school education and exposure to the prodigious collection of antiquities amassed by his relatives the Earls Fitzwilliam, and housed at their London house and Wentworth Woodhouse, Yorkshire, which Wentworth may have visited.

By the late 19th century Vaucluse House’s entrance hall, an unresolved, transverse space owing to the lack of a planned formal entrance, may have functioned as a gallery, with paintings after Old Masters and neoclassical sculptures, and recalling similarly (albeit far grander) arranged spaces in colonial houses of the 3rd and 4th quarter of the century including The Warren, Cooks river, and Greenoaks, Darling Point. The Dying Gaul does not feature in the 1869 view, the Entrance Hall, Vaucluse by Rebecca Martens, which depicts the hall during the occupancy of Thomasine Fisher (nee Wentworth) and her family.

Vaucluse House is furnished to reflect its initial occupancy by W.C. Wentworth, his wife Sarah, and their family 1827-1853 and 1861-62. The statuette is listed in the Lawson’s 1900 auction catalogue of the contents of Vaucluse House as the ‘Dying Gladiator’ (as it was popularly known throughout the 19th century, a name it retained even after a scholarly renaming in the 1820s). The catalogue also lists bronze statues of two Centaurs (likely the ‘Old and Young Centaurs’ from the Villa Adriana) and a bronze 'Crouching Venus' (after the Hellensitic original by Diodalsaas of Bithynia [active 240-200 BC]). Lawson’s 1900 auction catalogue also lists for the entrance hall, Lot 145 Bronze figure (Messina) on marble base, either another work by the same sculptor or a duplicate entry for the Dying Galatian. The statuette was formally donated to Vaucluse House in 1988 by by the Hon. W.C.Wentworth IV.