Museums.art

Auctions

The highest prices ever paid for art in the saleroom: what sold, when, for how much, and which house brought the hammer down.

$450.3m
The record: Salvator Mundi, 2017
27
Sales above $100 million
$4.87bn
Paid for the 39 lots on this page
1987
The year the modern records began

The ranking

Every bar is one sale, as long as its price and in the colour of the house that made it. Narrow the list, reorder it, and open a sale to read what happened.

House
Work
Order

39 sales, $4.87 billion in all

  1. Salvator Mundi: Christ facing the viewer, one hand raised in blessing, the other holding a crystal orb.
    Leonardo da Vinci (attributed), Public domain

    The highest price ever paid for a work of art, after nineteen minutes of bidding. The panel had sold for 45 pounds in 1958, when it was thought to be a copy. Its attribution to Leonardo is still argued over, and it has not been shown in public since the sale.

    Price
    $450.3 million
    Sold
    November 2017, New York
    Sold by
    Christie's
    Made
    c. 1500

The record, sale by sale

In 1987 a painting of sunflowers more than tripled the highest price ever paid at auction. The record has been broken 9 times since, and has grown more than tenfold.

0$100m$200m$300m$400m$500m1990200020102020

Point at a square, or tab to it, to see the sale.

  • Christie's
  • Sotheby's
  • Poly Auction
  • The record
  1. 1987Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers, Vincent van Gogh$39.7m
  2. 1987Irises, Vincent van Gogh$53.9m
  3. 1990Portrait of Dr Gachet, Vincent van Gogh$82.5m
  4. 2004Garçon à la pipe, Pablo Picasso$104.2m
  5. 2010L'Homme qui marche I, Alberto Giacometti$104.3m
  6. 2010Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, Pablo Picasso$106.5m
  7. 2012The Scream, Edvard Munch$119.9m
  8. 2013Three Studies of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon$142.4m
  9. 2015Les Femmes d'Alger (Version O), Pablo Picasso$179.4m
  10. 2017Salvator Mundi, Leonardo da Vinci$450.3m

The houses

Two houses, both founded in London in the eighteenth century, account for almost every sale on this page. Most of them were held in New York, in the two weeks of May and November when the great evening sales take place.

  • Christie's

    Founded in London, 1766

    Sales on this page
    22
    Their total
    $2.93 billion
    Share of the total
    60%
    Its highest
    Salvator Mundi, $450.3m

  • Sotheby's

    Founded in London, 1744

    Sales on this page
    16
    Their total
    $1.79 billion
    Share of the total
    37%
    Its highest
    Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, $236.4m

  • Poly Auction

    Founded in Beijing, 2005

    Sales on this page
    1
    Their total
    $140.8 million
    Share of the total
    3%
    Its highest
    Twelve Landscape Screens, $140.8m

The artists

A handful of names fill the top of the market. These are the artists with more than one sale on the list.

  1. Pablo Picasso6 sales, $739.7m
  2. Vincent van Gogh4 sales, $293.3m
  3. Gustav Klimt3 sales, $449.4m
  4. Alberto Giacometti3 sales, $346.6m
  5. Amedeo Modigliani2 sales, $327.6m
  6. Andy Warhol2 sales, $300.4m

How to read these figures

Prices are in US dollars as announced on the day of the sale, with the buyer's premium included. They are not adjusted for inflation, so an older sale counts for less here than it did at the time.

Only public auctions are counted. Works sold privately, some for more than anything on this page, are left out, because their prices are reported and not published.

Works still in copyright are shown without a picture. The names and wordmarks of the auction houses belong to them and are used only to say who made each sale. This site is not connected with any auction house. The drawing of the Christie's wordmark is by Rayukk, from Wikimedia Commons, under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.