Christie's is a British auction house founded in 1766 by James Christie. Its main premises are on King Street, St James's in London, and it has additional salerooms in New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Milan, Amsterdam, Geneva, Shanghai, and Dubai. It is owned by Groupe Artémis, the holding company of François Pinault. In 2022 Christie's sold $8.4 billion in art and luxury goods, an all-time high for any auction house. In 2017, the Salvator Mundi was sold at Christie's in New York for $450 million, the highest price ever paid for a single painting.
The Scream is a composition created by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch in 1893. The Norwegian name of the piece is Skrik (Scream), and the German title under which it was first exhibited is Der Schrei der Natur. The agonized face in the painting has become one of the most iconic images of art, seen as symbolizing the anxiety of the human condition. Munch's work, including The Scream, had a formative influence on the Expressionist movement.
John William Waterhouse was an English painter known for working first in the Academic style and for then embracing the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's style and subject matter. His paintings are known for their depictions of women from both ancient Greek mythology and Arthurian legend. A high proportion depict a single young and beautiful woman in a historical costume and setting, though there are some ventures into Orientalist painting and genre painting, still mostly featuring women.
Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based street artist, political activist and film director whose real name and identity remain unconfirmed and the subject of speculation. Active since the 1990s, his satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humour with graffiti executed in a distinctive stenciling technique. His works of political and social commentary have appeared on streets, walls and bridges throughout the world. Banksy's work grew out of the Bristol underground scene, which involved collaborations between artists and musicians. Banksy says that he was inspired by 3D, a graffiti artist and founding member of the musical group Massive Attack.
Sotheby's is a British-founded multinational corporation with headquarters in New York City. It is one of the world's largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewellery, and collectibles. It has 80 locations in 40 countries, and maintains a significant presence in the UK.
An art auction or fine art auction is the sale of art works, in most cases in an auction house.
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is a museum of American art in Bentonville, Arkansas. The museum, founded by Alice Walton and designed by Moshe Safdie, officially opened on 11 November 2011. It offers free public admission.
Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May is an oil painting on canvas created in 1908 by British Pre-Raphaelite artist John William Waterhouse. It was the first of two paintings inspired by the 17th century poem "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" by Robert Herrick which begins:
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may is the first line from the poem "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" by Robert Herrick. The words come originally from the Book of Wisdom in the Bible, chapter 2, verse 8. It was the inspiration for several works of art:
Shaun Greenhalgh is a British artist and former art forger. Over a seventeen-year period, between 1989 and 2006, he produced a large number of forgeries. With the assistance of his brother and elderly parents, who fronted the sales side of the operation, he successfully sold his fakes internationally to museums, auction houses, and private buyers, accruing nearly £1 million.
Sir Brodie Haldane Henderson, KCMG, CB was a British civil engineer. Henderson was primarily a railway engineer who worked for many railroad corporations across South America, Australasia and Africa. He was the consultant for the Dona Ana Bridge which, when it was built in 1935, was the longest railway bridge in the world with a length of 2.24 miles (3.60 km). He volunteered for service with the Royal Engineers at the outbreak of World War I and was put in charge of railway lines used to tranposrt Allied troops and supplies. In this capacity he held the rank of a Brigadier-General of the British Army and his success in this role resulted in him being decorated by the British, French and Belgian governments.
John Wick was a Dutch baroque painter, best known for his works on military subjects. There are still over 150 of his works known to be in existence.
The Finding of Moses is a 1904 oil-on-canvas painting by the Anglo-Dutch artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema. It was one of his last major works before his death in 1912, but quickly fell out of favour; according to rumour, it was sold in the 1950s for its frame. After appreciation of Victorian painting was renewed towards the end of the 20th century, it was described in an auction catalogue in 1995 as "the undisputed masterpiece of [Alma-Tadema's] last decade, as well as a late flowering of the nineteenth-century's love-affair with Egypt". It was sold to a private collector at auction in 2010 for nearly US$36 million.
William Walker Morris was a British nineteenth-century painter of the Victorian period who worked in Greenwich and Deptford, England, and was known particularly for his bucolic genre oil paintings depicting sporting and homestead life, with an emphasis on hunting dogs. His works draw upon the imagery of life in the Scottish Highlands. He died at some time from 1867 to 1881.
