This is a list of the highest known prices paid for paintings. The current record price is approximately US$450 million paid for Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi in November 2017.[1][2]
The United States dollar is the official currency of the United States and its territories per the United States Constitution since 1792. In practice, the dollar is divided into 100 smaller cent (¢) units, but is occasionally divided into 1000 mills (₥) for accounting. The circulating paper money consists of Federal Reserve Notes that are denominated in United States dollars.
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, more commonly Leonardo da Vinci or simply Leonardo, was an Italian polymath of the Renaissance whose areas of interest included invention, drawing, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history, and cartography. He has been variously called the father of palaeontology, ichnology, and architecture, and he is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time. The Mona Lisa is the most famous of his works and the most popular portrait ever made. The Last Supper is the most reproduced religious painting of all time and his Vitruvian Man drawing is regarded as a cultural icon as well. Perhaps 15 of his paintings have survived. Nevertheless, these few works—together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting—compose a contribution to later generations of artists rivalled only by that of Leonardo's contemporary Michelangelo.
Salvator Mundi is a painting by Italian Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci dated to c. 1500. Long thought to be a copy of a lost original veiled with overpainting, it was rediscovered, restored, and included in a major Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery, London, in 2011–12. Although several leading scholars have considered it to be an original work by Leonardo, this attribution has been disputed by other specialists, some of whom posit that he only contributed certain elements.
The most famous paintings, especially old master works done before 1803, are generally owned or held at museums, for viewing by patrons. Since the museums rarely sell them they are considered priceless. Guinness World Records lists da Vinci's Mona Lisa as having the highest ever insurance value for a painting. On permanent display at the Louvre in Paris, the Mona Lisa was assessed at US$100 million on December 14, 1962. Taking inflation into account, the 1962 value would be around US$830 million in 2018.[3]
A museum is an institution that cares for (conserves) a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make these items available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary. The largest museums are located in major cities throughout the world, while thousands of local museums exist in smaller cities, towns and rural areas. Museums have varying aims, ranging from serving researchers and specialists to serving the general public. The goal of serving researchers is increasingly shifting to serving the general public.
Guinness World Records, known from its inception from 1955 until 2000 as The Guinness Book of Records and in previous United States editions as The Guinness Book of World Records, is a reference book published annually, listing world records both of human achievements and the extremes of the natural world. The brainchild of Sir Hugh Beaver, the book was co-founded by brothers Norris and Ross McWhirter in Fleet Street, London in August 1954.
The Mona Lisa is a half-length portrait painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci that has been described as "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world." The Mona Lisa is also one of the most valuable paintings in the world. It holds the Guinness World Record for the highest known insurance valuation in history at US$100 million in 1962.
The earliest sale on the list below (Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh) is from March 1987; with a price of £24.75 million (£68.4 million in 2018 currency). This sale tripled the previous record, and introduced a new era in top art sales. Before this, the highest absolute price paid for a painting was £8.1 million (£18.9 million in 2018 currency) paid by the J. Paul Getty Museum for Andrea Mantegna's Adoration of the Magi at Christie's in London on April 18, 1985.[4] In constant dollars, the highest price paid before 1987 was by the National Gallery of Art when in February 1967 they acquired Leonardo da Vinci's Ginevra de' Benci for around $5 million ($38million in 2018 dollars) from the Princely Family of Liechtenstein. The sale of Van Gogh's Sunflowers was the first time a "modern" (in this case 1888) painting became the record holder, as opposed to the old master paintings which previously had dominated the market. In contrast, there are currently only nine pre-1875 paintings among the listed top 89, and none created between 1635 and 1874.
Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch post-impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterised by bold colours and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. He was not commercially successful, and his suicide at 37 followed years of mental illness and poverty.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, commonly referred to as the Getty, is an art museum in California housed on two campuses: the Getty Center and Getty Villa. The two locations received over two million visitors in 2016.
Andrea Mantegna was an Italian painter, a student of Roman archeology, and son-in-law of Jacopo Bellini. Like other artists of the time, Mantegna experimented with perspective, e.g. by lowering the horizon in order to create a sense of greater monumentality. His flinty, metallic landscapes and somewhat stony figures give evidence of a fundamentally sculptural approach to painting. He also led a workshop that was the leading producer of prints in Venice before 1500.
An exceptional case is graffiti artist David Choe, who accepted payment in shares for painting graffiti art in the headquarters of a fledgling Facebook. His shares were of limited value when he was given them, but by the time of Facebook's IPO they were valued at around $200m.[5]
David Choe is an American street artist. His figure paintings, which explore themes of desire, degradation, and exaltation, are characterized by a raw, frenetic tone that he has termed "dirty style." In the graffiti world, he is identified with the bucktoothed whale he has been spray-painting on the streets since he was in his teens. David also hosted DVDASA, a lifestyle, relationship and entertainment podcast with co-host Asa Akira. He also became widely recognized for his watercolor works which exhibited in his solo show at the Museo Universario del Chopo, Mexico City in 2013. After receiving extensive therapy and treatment, he quietly reemerged in 2017 with a new body of work and a comprehensive exhibition in Los Angeles that presented heavy themes of trauma, self-reflection and hope for recovery.
In financial markets, a share is a unit used as mutual funds, limited partnerships, and real estate investment trusts. The owner of shares in the corporation/company is a shareholder of the corporation. A share is an indivisible unit of capital, expressing the ownership relationship between the company and the shareholder. The denominated value of a share is its face value, and the total of the face value of issued shares represent the capital of a company, which may not reflect the market value of those shares.
Facebook, Inc. is an American online social media and social networking service company based in Menlo Park, California. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. It is considered one of the Big Four technology companies along with Amazon, Apple, and Google.
The list is incomplete with respect to sales between private parties, as these are not always reported and, even if they are, details like the purchase price may remain secret. For example, on 25 June 2019, the American hedge fund manager J. Tomilson Hill bought a recently rediscovered Judith and Holofernes (1607) attributed to Caravaggio, two days before it would have been auctioned in Toulouse.[6] Though the Louvre Museum had turned down the opportunity to purchase it for €100 million,[7] the painting was estimated to sell for $110 to $170 million.[8] The actual purchase price will not be disclosed, because of a confidentiality agreement attached to the private sale.[6]
James Tomilson "Tom" Hill III is an American billionaire hedge fund manager, the vice chairman of the Blackstone Group, and president and CEO of Blackstone Alternative Asset Management (BAAM), the firm's hedge funds business. He sits on the firm's management and executive committees, and is a main board board of director.
Michelangelo Merisida Caravaggio was an Italian painter active in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily from the early 1590s to 1610. His paintings combine a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, which had a formative influence on Baroque painting.
Toulouse is the capital of the French department of Haute-Garonne and of the region of Occitanie. The city is on the banks of the River Garonne, 150 kilometres from the Mediterranean Sea, 230 km (143 mi) from the Atlantic Ocean and 680 km (420 mi) from Paris. It is the fourth-largest city in France, with 466,297 inhabitants as of January 2014. In France, Toulouse is called the "Pink City".
Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol are by far the best-represented artists in the list. Whereas Picasso and Warhol became wealthy men, Van Gogh is known to have sold only one painting in his lifetime, The Red Vineyard, for 400 francs (approximately $2,000 in 2018 dollars) to the impressionist painter and heiress Anna Boch.[9] Prices realised for just his nine paintings listed below, when adjusted for inflation to 2017, add up to over US$ 900million.
Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by the German and Italian airforces during the Spanish Civil War.
Andy Warhol was an American artist, director and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental film Chelsea Girls (1966), and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67).
The Red Vineyards near Arles is an oil painting by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, executed on a privately primed Toile de 30 piece of burlap in early November 1888. It depicts workers in a vineyard, and is believed to be the only painting van Gogh sold during his lifetime.
Most expensive painting by a female artist
Georgia O'Keeffe holds the record for the highest price paid for a painting by a woman. On 20 November 2014 at Sotheby's, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art bought her 1932 painting Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 for US$ 44.4 million (equivalent to US$47million in 2018).[10][11]
Most expensive non-Western paintings
Among the listed top 89, only 3 are paintings by non-Western artists. They are traditional Chinese paintings by Qi Baishi and Wang Meng. In particular, Qi Baishi's Twelve Landscape Screens was sold for $140.8m in 2017. Though just missing the list, notably, the Chinese-French painter Zao Wouki's oil painting Juin-Octobre 1985 was sold for $65m in 2018.
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This section needs to be updated. Please update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information.(November 2018)
Sale of the Most Expensive Paintings
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List of highest prices paid
This list is ordered by consumer price index inflation-adjusted value (in bold) in millions of United States dollars in 2018.[note 1] Where necessary, the price is first converted to dollars using the exchange rate at the time the painting was sold. The inflation adjustment may change as recent inflation rates are often revised. A list in another currency may be in a slightly different order due to exchange-rate fluctuations. Paintings are listed only once, i.e. for the highest price sold.
↑ The Wikipedia template uses a yearly average inflation. Using monthly averages gives slightly different numbers, most significantly for paintings sold early or late in a year with significant inflation.
↑ Exact price (even the currency of sale) is not known, with estimates from $250 million to even $300 million
↑ Within weeks after a private viewing in Vienna in September 2012, Rybolovlev agreed to pay $183.8 million via his dealer Bouvier. At the same time, Bouvier was negotiating and eventually succeeded to buy the painting for $112 million from Ursula Ucicky, widow of Gustav Ucicky (the illegitimate son of Gustav Klimt and one of his models). Ucicky shared half with the heirs of the Jewish family from whom the painting had been seized in 1939. After The Bouvier Affair unfolded, Rybolovlev resold the painting for $170 million in November 2015.[21][22]
↑ Some fear existed, that Portrait of Dr. Gachet had been cremated with the owner in 1996, but Gachet's portrait was privately resold to Wolfgang Flöttl in 1997 or 1998 for $65-$90 million through Sotheby’s. Before 2007, Flöttl had sold it for $100 million to an unknown buyer.[36][37]
↑ Oprah Winfrey had bought the painting in November 2006 at Christie's for nearly $88 million. At that time this was the 4th highest (unadjusted) price at auction and 10th highest price on this list.
↑ The triptych had probably been reassembled by the Italian collector Francesco De Simone Niquesa, but were resold to a person in the US before 2013[41][42]
↑ This is the small version of the painting; the large version is at the Musée d'Orsay.
↑ Privately resold for ca. $50 million through Sotheby’s in 1997.[37]
↑ One of two pastel versions; another two painted versions (and lithography) exist, all created by Munch.
↑ Rybolovlev resold Gauguin's Otahi before 2017 for less than $50 million.[49]
↑ This stands as the most expensive painting by a living artist.
↑ The paintings transferred to the dealers include a late Monet entitled Corona (Water Lilies) from around 1920; Renoir's Reclining Nude of 1902; Kandinsky's Autumn Landscape, Murnau from 1908, and Picasso's Striped Bodice from September 1943.
↑ Alan Bond could not pay off the painting, and Irises was resold (probably for somewhat less) to the Getty Museum.
↑ Price excludes sales commission and other costs.
↑ Rybolovlev resold Te Fare in February 2017 at Christie's in London for $25 million.[77]
↑ Steve Wynn, who bid on the painting at auction, privately acquired the work several months later from the unidentified buyer for an undisclosed, supposedly lower price. Kenneth Griffin acquired it in 2004 from Wynn.[84]
↑ The Nahmad family bought Suprematist Composition in 2008 at Sotheby's, New York, for $60,002,500 ($70million in 2018 dollars) from the heirs of Kazimir Malevich.[94][95][96]
↑ Usually estimated at "over €50 M" or "between 50 and 60 million Euros". On July 12, 2011, $75M was equivalent to €53M.
↑ A Belgian banker and collector who bought it in 1939 for $18,000. His was the last name on the 1988 provenance list; painting came from "a private collection in Arizona"
↑ Son of Daniel (conductor & cellist) and Eleanore Saidenberg who were Picasso's New York dealers from 1955 to 1973.[113]
↑ On Oct. 7, 2005, The New York Times reported that Steven Cohen bought van Gogh's "Peasant Woman Against a Background of Wheat" and Gauguin's "Bathers" (1903) from Steve Wynn for approximately $110 million,[117] though guesses range from $100-150 million. One or both of the paintings may thus occur higher on this list.
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↑ Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Community Development Project. "Consumer Price Index (estimate) 1800–". Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Retrieved January 2, 2019.
↑ On June 11, 2017, Ms. Gund revealed that she intended to use the proceeds from the sale of the painting for a specific purpose: to create a fund that supports criminal justice reform and seeks to reduce mass incarceration in the United States.Pogrebin, Robin (11 June 2017). "Agnes Gund Sells a Lichtenstein to Start Criminal Justice Fund". The New York Times. Retrieved 11 June 2017.
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