What is the highest price ever paid for a Rembrandt painting at auction?
Portrait of a Man with Arms Akimbo
The painting was rediscovered in December 2009 after being off public display for around forty years. It was purchased by Steve Wynn at Christie's in December 2009 for £20 million, the highest price ever paid for a painting by Rembrandt. In 2011 it was purchased by Isabel and Alfred Bader. They offered it for sale at the 2011 TEFAF art show in Maastricht for 47 million euros. The Baders donated the painting to the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in December 2015.
Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings
Franz Zatzenstein-Matthiesen, a young German art dealer, had been asked by the Soviet Government to compile a list of the hundred paintings in Russian collections, which should never be sold under any circumstances. He was surprised soon afterwards to find several of the paintings on his list were in Paris, purchased by Gulbenkian. Gulbenkian asked him to act as his agent on further purchases, but Matthiesen instead formed a consortium with Colnaghi's of London and with Mellon's firm, Knoedler. In 1930 and 1931 the consortium bought twenty-one paintings from the Soviet government, which they offered to Mellon, who had the right of first refusal. By the end of 1931, Mellon had acquired twenty-one paintings for a total price of $6,654,000. They included Van Eyck's "Annunciation" and Raphael's "The Alba Madonna". The latter painting was sold for $1,166,400, the largest sum ever paid for a single painting until that time. The consortum sold several other paintings to other clients, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Peter Paul Rubens
Missing works by Rubens are:At a Sotheby's auction on 10 July 2002, Rubens's painting "Massacre of the Innocents", rediscovered not long before, sold for £49.5 million (US$76.2 million) to Lord Thomson. At the end of 2013 this remained the record auction price for an Old Master painting. At a Christie's auction in 2012, "Portrait of a Commander" sold for £9.1 million (US$13.5 million) despite a dispute over the authenticity so that Sotheby's refused to auction it as a Rubens.
Huntington Hartford
Hartford owned an extensive art collection. In an interview by Edward R. Murrow on his show "Person to Person" he gave a tour of the collection at his Beekman Place apartment including Rembrandt's "Portrait of a man, half-length, with his arms akimbo", which sold at Christie's auction house in London on December 8, 2009 for $33 million, a world record for a Rembrandt.
The Senses (Rembrandt)
"Unconscious Patient" depicts a woman attempting to revive a man with smelling salts, as a barber-surgeon watches. Long missing, it was identified when offered for auction in New Jersey, United States, in 2015, with an estimate of $US500-800, titled "Oil on Board, Triple Portrait with Lady Fainting" and catalogued as "Continental School, 19thC., Appears unsigned", with no named artist, and as having "paint loss, some restoration to paint, [and] wood cracks". It eventually sold, to the Leiden Collection, for an unknown sum, after achieving $870,000 at the auction, and was subsequently cleaned, revealing its "brilliant palette, descriptive brushwork, and tightly arranged figures".
Claude Monet
Monet's "Le Pont du chemin de fer à Argenteuil", an 1873 painting of a railway bridge spanning the Seine near Paris, was bought by an anonymous telephone bidder for a record $41.4 million at Christie's auction in New York on 6 May 2008. The previous record for his painting stood at $36.5 million. Just a few weeks later, "Le bassin aux nymphéas" (from the water lilies series) sold at Christie's 24 June 2008 auction in London, lot 19, for £36,500,000 ($71,892,376.34) (hammer price) or £40,921,250 ($80,451,178) with fees, nearly doubling the record for the artist and representing one of the top 20 highest prices paid for a painting at the time.
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I
When Altmann was asked what she wanted to do with the paintings, she stated "I would not want any private person to buy these paintings, ... It is very meaningful to me that they are seen by anybody who wants to see them, because that would have been the wish of my aunt." In June 2006 the "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" was sold to Ronald Lauder for $135 million, at the time a record price for a painting. Eileen Kinsella, the editor of "ARTnews", considered the high price was due to several factors, particularly the painting's provenance, the increasing demand for Austrian Expressionism, rising prices in the art world and "Lauder's passion for and pursuit of this particular work". Lauder placed the work in the Neue Galerie, the New York-based gallery he co-founded. The painting has been on display at the location since.
Jack Vettriano
In 1996 Sir Terence Conran commissioned Vettriano to create a series of paintings for his new Bluebird Gastrodome in London. The seven paintings, inspired by the life of Sir Malcolm Campbell, hung there for ten years. Heartbreak Publishing, Vettriano's own publishing company, produced a boxed set featuring signed, limited-edition prints of all seven paintings to mark the 75th anniversary of Sir Malcolm Campbell's final World Land Speed Record. The Bluebird paintings were auctioned by Sotheby's at the Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire on 30 August 2007, and made more than £1m in all: the most expensive was "Bluebird at Bonneville", bought for £468,000.
Artemis and the Stag
The sculpture was auctioned at Sotheby's New York by Hugh Hildesley on 7 June 2007. Estimated to reach between $5 and $7 million, "Artemis and the Stag" broke records when it was sold for $28.6 million. It became the most valuable sculpture ever sold at auction, breaking the 2005 record of $27.4 million for Constantin Brâncuși's "Bird in Space". The sale price has since been surpassed by several modern works, but the only other sculpture from antiquity to fetch a higher price is the Guennol Lioness. The winning bidder remained anonymous, employing art dealer Giuseppe Eskenazi to complete the auction.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard
On December 5, 2013, in Bonhams New Bond Street, London, Salerooms the Fragonard portrait of François-Henri duc d'Harcourt sold for £17,106,500 Sterling – US $28,058,081 – setting a world record price for the artist at auction. The previous record was £5,300,000 for a painting sold in London in 1999. The sum paid is also the highest price for an Old Master Painting sold at auction anywhere in the world in 2013. Bonhams' sale of paintings and sculpture from the renowned collection of the German philanthropist, the late Dr Gustav Rau, raised more than £19 million, with the proceeds benefiting the Foundation of the German Committee for UNICEF – for the children of the world.
Books
Alois Miedl
After famous collector Jacques Goudstikker had died when fleeing the Netherlands, Miedl bought his collection of 1300 old master paintings and other artworks illegally, and sold 600 of the paintings to Hermann Göring. Alois Miedl acquired for himself the Goudstikker estate Oostermeer in Ouderkerk a/d Amstel, where he would live in splendour, and the gallery including Nijenrode Castle . All of it was bought for 2 million guilders, which was only a fraction of the actual value at the time. Among the pictures sold to Göring were "Two Philosophers" by Rembrandt and works by Salomon van Ruysdael, Hans Memling, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Gerard ter Borch, Jacopo del Casentino and Frans Hals. The works kept by Miedl included Rembrandt's "Young man with a sword", which he sold in 1944 in Germany to pay off a loan.
Wendell Cherry
The American art magazine "Art & Antiques" named Cherry in 1985 among the 100 most important art collectors of the United States. The reputation of this collection was not only because of the quality of the works, but also for the sometimes very high prices that he paid for these pictures and scored from subsequent sales. A record-breaking example of these works was Pablo Picasso's self-portrait "Yo, Picasso". Cherry purchased the picture in 1981 at Sotheby's for $5.3 million. At the time the highest amount ever paid for a Picasso painting. The same painting was sold by Cherry in May 1989 again at Sotheby's and received from the highest bidder, the Greek shipowner Stavros Niarchos, $47.9 million—again the highest price for a work of Picasso and also the second highest ever paid for a work of art at that time.
Willem de Kooning
Some of de Kooning's paintings have been sold in the 21st century for near record prices. In November 2006, David Geffen sold his oil painting "Woman III" to Steven A. Cohen for $137.5 million, just below the record at the time of $140 million, which involved the same people in the same month for Jackson Pollock's No. 5, 1948. A month earlier Cohen had already paid Geffen $63.5 million for "Police Gazette" by de Kooning. In September 2015 David Geffen sold de Kooning's oil painting "Interchange" for $300 million to hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin. As of 2017, this de Kooning painting was displaced by the da Vinci Salvator Mundi as receiving the highest price paid for a painting, which in 2016 was almost matched by the sale of Paul Gauguin's "When Will You Marry?" in February 2015 for close to $300 million. In November 2016, "Untitled XXV" sold for $66.3 million at Christie's in New York. This was a record price for a Kooning piece sold at auction.
Triptych
The then highest price ever paid for an artwork at auction was $142.4 million for a 1969 triptych, "Three Studies of Lucian Freud", by Francis Bacon in November 2012. The record was broken in May 2015 by $179.4 million for Pablo Picasso's 1955 painting "Les Femmes d’Alger".
Pendant portraits of Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit
The previous record for a pair of paintings was for two Titians, his "Diana and Callisto" and "Diana and Actaeon", that also hang side by side and are today joinedly owned by the National Gallery and the National Galleries of Scotland. The previous record for a painting purchase at the Rijksmuseum was for "A Mayor of Delft and his Daughter" by Jan Steen, for which they paid 11.9 million euro's in July 2004. The most expensive Rembrandt portrait sold before these is "Portrait of a Foreign Admiral", sold at Christie's in December 2009 for £20 million.
The Heart of the Andes
Church eventually sold the work to William Tilden Blodgett for $10,000—at that time the highest price paid for a work by a living American artist. Moreover, Church reserved the right to re-sell the painting should he receive an offer of at least $20,000. (American landscapist Albert Bierstadt surpassed both prices when he sold "The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak" for $25,000 in 1865.) Blodgett held the painting until his death in 1875. It was acquired by Margaret Worcester Dows, widow of grain merchant David Dows, and bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art upon her death in February 1909. In 1993, the museum held an exhibition that attempted to reproduce the conditions of the 1859 exhibit.
George Stubbs
The record price for a Stubbs painting was set by the sale at auction of "Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath, with a Trainer, a Stable-Lad, and a Jockey" (1765) at Christie's in London in July 2011 for £22.4 million. It was sold by the British Woolavington Collection of sporting art; the buyer was unidentified.
The British Royal Collection holds 16 paintings by Stubbs.
Franz Marc
Marc's family house in Munich is marked with a historical plaque. In October 1998, several of Marc's paintings garnered record prices at Christie's art auction house in London, including "Rote Rehe I" ("Red Deer I"), which sold for $3.3 million. In October 1999, his "Der Wasserfall" ("The Waterfall") was sold by Sotheby's in London for $5.06 million. This price set a record for Franz Marc's work and for twentieth-century German painting.
The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis
The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis is an oil painting by the Dutch painter Rembrandt, c. 1661–62, which was originally the largest he ever painted, at about five by five metres in the shape of a lunette. The painting was commissioned by the Amsterdam city council for the Town Hall. After the work had been in place briefly, it was returned to Rembrandt, who may have never been paid. Rembrandt drastically cut down the painting to a quarter of the original size to be sold. It is the last secular history painting he finished.
David Martínez (businessman)
Specializing in modern and contemporary works, David Martínez has been reported as also owning pieces by Mark Rothko, Pablo Picasso and Damien Hirst. In 2006 he reportedly set a record for the highest price paid for a piece of art with the purchase of a Jackson Pollock painting from David Geffen. Pollock's painting "No. 5, 1948" sold for US$140 million (£73m), on 1 November 2006. However, the auction expert Josh Baer stated that Martinez was not the buyer of the painting. In addition, Shearman & Sterling issued a press release on behalf of its client, David Martinez, to announce that contrary to articles in the press, Martinez does not own the painting or any rights to acquire it. In October 2012, however, the New York Times reported that despite these and other denials, “several people with knowledge of” Martínez's collection have said that the Pollock work hangs in his New York apartment.
Art auction
The H. A. Blyth sale (March 11 to 13, 1901, 346 lots, : 10s.) of mezzotint portraits was even more remarkable, and as a collection it was the choicest sold in the first decade of the 20th century, the engravings being mostly in the first state. The record prices were numerous, and, in many cases, far surpassed the prices which Sir Joshua Reynolds received for the original pictures; e.g. the exceptionally fine example of the first state of the "Duchess of Rutland", after Reynolds, by V. Green, realized 1,000 gns., whereas the artist received only for the painting itself. Even this unprecedented price for a mezzotint portrait was exceeded on the 30 April 1901, when an example of the first published state of "Mrs Carnac", after Reynolds, by J. R. Smith, sold for 1,160 gns. At the Louis Huth sale (1905) 83 lots brought nearly Reynolds's "Lady Bampfylde" by T. Watson, first state before letters, unpublished, fetching 1,200 gns. Such prices as these and many others which might be quoted are exceptional, but they were paid for objects of exceptional rarity or quality.
Portrait of Catharina Hooghsaet
Portrait of Catharina Hooghsaet (1607–1685) is a painting by the Dutch Golden Age painter Rembrandt, painted in 1657 and in 2014 was lent to the National Gallery for an exhibition on Rembrandt's late works that in 2015 travelled to the Rijksmuseum. It was the property of Penrhyn Castle at the time and was sold shortly thereafter. The painting was to be sold to a private collector outside the UK for £35 million in September 2015 but had not received an export license yet in October. Since 2016 the painting has been on display in the National Museum Cardiff.
Eight Elvises
In 2008 "Eight Elvises" was sold by Annibale Berlingieri, who had owned it for 40 years, in a private sale for $100 million to an unidentified collector. News of the sale, which was not announced publicly at the time, was broken by art writer Sarah Thornton and published in "The Economist" in late 2009. The deal was brokered by Philippe Ségalot, a New York-based art dealer and one time head of the contemporary art department at Christie's auction house. The sale made "Eight Elvises" one of the most expensive paintings ever sold, and made Warhol only the fifth artist, behind Pablo Picasso, Gustav Klimt, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning to have a painting sold for at least $100 million. The current location of the painting is unknown.
Jasper Johns
In 1980 the Whitney Museum of American Art paid $1 million for "Three Flags" (1958), then the highest price ever paid for the work of a living artist. In 1988, Johns' "False Start" was sold at auction at Sotheby's to Samuel I. Newhouse, Jr. for $17.05 million, setting a record at the time as the highest price paid for a work by a living artist at auction, and the second highest price paid for an artwork at auction in the U.S. In 2006, private collectors Anne and Kenneth Griffin (founder of the Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel LLC) bought "False Start" (1959) from David Geffen for $80 million, making it the most expensive painting by a living artist. On November 11, 2014, a 1983 version of "Flag" was auctioned at Sotheby's in New York for $36 million, establishing a new auction record for Johns.
Memorial Guild Cup (Adam van Vianen)
During the French occupation after 1794 the guilds were disbanded and the collection was dispersed. In 1821 the cup was sold for 166 guilders and it came into the hands of a collection in Scotland. It came up for auction in 1976 and the Rijksmuseum purchased it for 700,000 guilders with support from the Vereniging Rembrandt. At the time, it was the highest price ever paid for a piece of silver in the Netherlands. The reason had to do with the number of times the ewer was featured in prominent paintings of the 17th century. A selection of these are:
Egon Schiele
The dispute was settled on 20 July 2010 and the picture subsequently purchased by the Leopold Museum for US$19 million. In 2013, the museum sold three drawings by Schiele for £14 million at Sotheby's London in order to settle the restitution claim over its 1914 Schiele painting "Houses by the Sea". The most expensive, "Liebespaar (Selbstdarstellung mit Wally)" (1914/15), or "Two lovers (Self Portrait With Wally)", raised the world auction record for a work on paper by the artist to £7.88 million.
Rembrandt Bugatti
His art works are now also highly priced. A cast of his 1909-1910 bronze, "Babouin Sacré Hamadryas" (Sacred Hamadryas Baboon), was auctioned at Sotheby's in 2006 for $2.56 million. In May, 2010, the "Babouin" reappeared at auction at Sotheby's (est. $2/3 million), along with a male and female "Lion" and "Lionne de Nubie" (est. $1.5/2 million and $1.2/1.8 million, respectively), a "Grande girafe tête basse" (est. $1/1.5 million) and seven other pieces from the S. Joel Schur Collection, perhaps the finest collection of masterpieces by Bugatti in private hands according to one report. One of the Bugatti pieces was reported sold apparently as part of a group of sculptures (with three Rodin and a Noguchi) for an aggregate of $20 million.
When Will You Marry?
When Will You Marry? (, ) is an oil painting from 1892 by the French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin. On loan to the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland for nearly a half-century, it was sold privately by the family of Rudolf Staechelin to Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad Al-Thani, in February 2015 for close to US $210 million (£155 million), one of the highest prices ever paid for a work of art. The painting was on exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, until 28 June 2015.
Robert Crumb
In 2017, Crumb's original cover art for the 1969 "Fritz the Cat" collection published by Ballantine sold at auction for $717,000, the highest sale price to that point for any piece of American cartoon art.
Art auction
The Holland sale, in June 1908, realized (432 lots), a "record" sum for a collection of pictures mainly by modern artists; and that for the Rodolphe Kann collection (Paris) of pictures and objects of art, including 11 magnificent Rembrandts, Messrs Duveen paid in 1907. In every direction there has been a tendency to increase prices for really great artistic pieces, even to a sensational extent. The competition has become acute, largely owing to American and German acquisitiveness. By 1911 the demand for the finest works of art of all descriptions was much greater than the supply. By the early 20th century the turnover of one London firm alone had occasionally exceeded annually, which give an indication of the size of the art market at that time.
Amedeo Modigliani
In November 2010, a painting of a nude by Amedeo Modigliani, part of a series of nudes he created around 1917, sold for more than $68.9m (£42.7m) at an auction in New York—a record for the artist's work. Bidding for "La Belle Romaine" pushed its price well past its $40m (£24.8m) estimate. Modigliani's previous auction record was 43.2m euros (£35.8m), set earlier in 2010 in Paris. Another painting by the artist—Jeanne Hébuterne (au chapeau), one of the first portraits he painted of his lover—sold for $19.1m (£11.8m), much higher than its pre-sale estimate of $9–12m (£5.6–7.4m).
Jacob van Ruisdael
The art historian Hendrik Frederik Wijnman disproved the myth that Ruisdael died a poor man, supposedly in the old men's almshouse in Haarlem. Wijnman showed that the person who died there was in fact Ruisdael's cousin, Jacob Salomonszoon. Although there is no record of Ruisdael owning land or shares, he appears to have lived comfortably, even after the economic downturn of the disaster year 1672. His paintings were valued fairly highly. In a large sample of inventories between 1650 and 1679 the average price for a Ruisdael was 40 guilders, compared to an average of 19 guilders for all attributed paintings. In a ranking of contemporary Dutch painters based on price-weighted frequency in these inventories, Ruisdael ranks seventh; Rembrandt ranks first.
Rembrandt House Museum
Rembrandt purchased the house in 1639 and lived there until he went bankrupt in 1656, when all his belongings went on auction. The auction list enabled the reconstructions of all his belongings which are also on display in the house.
James Siena
Works by James Siena have been sold by all the major auction houses including Christie's, Sothebys, Bonhams, Phillips de Pury & Company and Freeman's Auctioneers & Appraisers. Siena's most expensive work sold to date at auction was an enamel on aluminum painting entitled, "Blue Line Rectangle" (1994). It had a pre-auction estimate of $20,000-$30,000 and sold for $40,000 on November 9, 2011 at Christie's.
Big Painting No. 6
In early 1970, Andy Warhol established the record auction price for a painting by a living American artist with a $60,000 (US$ in dollars) sale of "Big Campbell's Soup Can with Torn Label (Vegetable Beef)" (1962), which is part of the "Campbell's Soup Cans" series, in a sale at Parke-Bernet, the preeminent American auction house of the day (later acquired by Sotheby's). This record was broken in November 1970 by Lichtenstein's "Big Painting No. 6" with an auction sale for $75,000 (US$ in dollars) to German art dealer Rudolf Zwirner.
Rembrandt in Southern California
Rembrandt, "Saint Bartholomew", 1661, was sold in 1962 at a Sotheby's, London standing-room only sale. Purchased by J. Paul Getty, it is now in collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum.
François-Henri d'Harcourt
On December 5, 2013, in Bonhams New Bond Street, London, Salerooms a Fragonard portrait of d'Harcourt sold for £17,106,500 Sterling - US $28,058,081 - setting a World record price for the artist at auction. The previous record was £5,300,000 for a painting sold in London in 1999. The sum paid is also the highest price for an Old Master Painting sold at auction anywhere in the World in 2013. Bonhams' sale of paintings and sculpture from the collection of the German philanthropist, the late Dr Gustav Rau, raised more than £19 million, with the proceeds benefiting the Foundation of the German Committee for UNICEF – for the children of the world.
Portrait of Catharina Hooghsaet
Genealogy experts from the Dutch Hoogzaad family paid a visit to the Rijksmuseum in 2007 when the painting was on loan there. The Hoogzaad family papers showed that Catharina or Catrina or Trijn was the granddaughter of Dirck Pietersz van Nierop, a man from a farm in Nieuwe Niedorp called Hoochsaet and that this is the origin of the Hoogzaad name. The painting had been on loan since November 2006 for the end of the Rembrandt year celebrated in Amsterdam. An article in the Noord-Hollands Dagblad mentions the Hoogzaad family's work and that the owners of the painting, the family Douglas-Pennant, were at that time negotiating a sale with the Rijksmuseum for €70 million. The NRC during the same period also remarked on the possible Rembrandt deal, but did not mention a price. The Rijksmuseum had earlier acquired the Jan Steen painting from the Douglas-Pennant family in 2004 called "A Mayor of Delft and his Daughter".
Rubens Peale with a Geranium
Rubens is both wearing and holding glasses. In this era, portraits subjects rarely wore glasses. The historian Billie Follensbee suggests that Peale sat for the portrait holding his glasses in his hand, with Rembrandt Peale returning to the canvas later and overpainting another pair of glasses on his face. This would account for the impossible combination of the strong lens refractions seen on his cheeks with the lack of visual distortion seen through the lenses. There is no physical evidence that the glasses were added later, but Rubens' daughter, who received the painting in 1854, wrote that they were a later addition.
The painting was acquired by his relative James Claypoole Copper, who later gave it to Rubens' daughter Mary Jane Peale (1827–1902), and the painting descended through the Peale family. It was sold to the art collector Lawrence A. Fleischman, and then before 1963 to Pauline E. Woolworth, wife of Norman Bailey Woolworth. In 1985 it was sold at Sotheby's to the National Gallery of Art, which paid $3.7 million (before buyer's premium). This set a record for an American work of art sold at auction, replacing Frederic Edwin Church's "The Icebergs" ($2.5 million).
Masterpiece (Roy Lichtenstein)
In January 2017, Agnes Gund sold the 1962 painting "Masterpiece", which for years hung over the mantle of her Upper East Side apartment, for $165 million. The proceeds of the sale will be used to start a fund for criminal justice reform called the Art for Justice fund. The painting is currently one of the 15 highest prices ever to be paid for a piece of artwork. The purchaser was Steven A. Cohen.
Fred Williams
His painting "Upwey Landscape" (1965) sold for $1,987,700 in one of the final auctions of Christie's in Australia in April 2006, which at the time was the second highest price for any work sold at an Australian auction. In September 2007, auction house Deutscher-Menzies broke their sales record with Williams' "Landscape with Water Ponds" (1965) selling for $1,860,000. The most expensive work sold at an Australian auction in 2009 was Williams' 1965 "Evening Sky, Upwey", which sold for $1.15 million.
Camille Pissarro
During his lifetime, Camille Pissarro sold few of his paintings. By the 21st century, however, his paintings were selling for millions. An auction record for the artist was set on 6 November 2007 at Christie's in New York, where a group of four paintings, "Les Quatre Saisons" (the Four Seasons), sold for $14,601,000 (estimate $12,000,000 – $18,000,000). In November 2009 "Le Pont Boieldieu et la Gare d'Orléans, Rouen, Soleil" sold for $7,026,500 at Sotheby's in New York. In February 2014 the 1897 "Le Boulevard de Montmartre, Matinée de Printemps", originally owned by the German industrialist and Holocaust victim Max Silberberg (), sold at Sotheby's in London for £19.9M, nearly five times the previous record.
Le Rêve (Picasso)
After a $90,000 repair, the painting was re-valued at $85 million. Wynn filled a claim to recover the $54 million perceived loss from his Lloyd's of London insurers, an amount which would have covered most of the initial cost of buying the painting. When the insurers balked, Wynn sued them in January 2007.
The case was eventually settled out of court in March 2007. Cohen bought the painting from Wynn in 2013 for $155 million (ca. $134 million in 2006 dollars). Ignoring inflation, the price was estimated to be the highest ever paid for an artwork by a U.S. collector until Kenneth C. Griffin's ~$300 million purchase of Willem de Kooning's "Interchange" in September 2015.
Francis Bacon (artist)
On 14 May 2008, the "Triptych, 1976", sold at Sotheby's for €55.465 million ($86.28 million), then a record for the artist and the highest price paid for a postwar work of art at auction up to 2008. On 13 November 2013, "Three Studies of Lucian Freud" sold at Christie's New York for $142.4 million, surpassing both "Triptych" and "1976" in auctioned value, and more importantly claiming the record for highest auction price of a work of art at that time, a title previously held by the fourth version of Edvard Munch's "Scream" and now held by Leonardo da Vinci's ""Salvator Mundi"".
Thomas Eakins
On November 11, 2006, the Board of Trustees at Thomas Jefferson University agreed to sell "The Gross Clinic" to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas for a record $68,000,000, the highest price for an Eakins painting as well as a record price for an individual American-made portrait. On December 21, 2006, a group of donors agreed to match the price in order to keep the painting in Philadelphia. It is displayed alternately at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Vladimir Tretchikoff
The most expensive Tretchikoff painting to date is "Chinese Girl" which went for nearly £1,000,000 at Bonhams, London in March 2013. The previous record was "Red Jacket", which fetched £337,250 in October 2012, also at Bonhams.
Ronald Lauder
On June 18, 2006, he purchased from Maria Altmann and her family, the painting "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" by Gustav Klimt for $135 million, the highest price ever paid for a painting at that time. Lauder called the painting "Our Mona Lisa". He reportedly saw Klimt's portrait as a youth in Vienna and had admired it since. The painting, a Nazi-looted art piece which had just been restored to Altmann following years of negotiation and litigation with the Austrian government, now forms the centerpiece of the museum's collection.
Woman in Gold (film)
In June 2006, based on an earlier agreement between Altmann and Ronald Lauder (which was shown in the film), Altmann sold "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" to Lauder's Neue Galerie in New York for $135 million ($ million today), setting a new mark for most expensive painting (since surpassed). Five months later, Altmann sold the companion "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II" at auction (bought by Oprah Winfrey) for almost $88 million ($ million today), then the fourth-highest priced painting.
Cady Noland
Noland set the record for the highest price ever paid for an artwork by a living woman ($6.6 million), for her 1989 work "Oozewald" sold at Sotheby's. In the fall of 2012 the same auction house, Sotheby's, removed her aluminum print "Cowboys Milking" (1990) from a contemporary sale after the artist "disavowed" the work. Both Noland and the auction house were later sued by the piece's owner, gallerist Marc Jancou, for twenty six million dollars (with twenty million having been sought from Noland and six from Sotheby's). In November 2012 a judge dismissed Jancou's lawsuit.
Edvard Munch
In October 2006, the color woodcut "Two people. The lonely" ("To mennesker. De ensomme") set a new record for his prints when it was sold at an auction in Oslo for 8.1 million kroner (US$1.27 million). It also set a record for the highest price paid in auction in Norway. On 3 November 2008, the painting "Vampire" set a new record for his paintings when it was sold for US$38,162,000 at Sotheby's New York.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
A record price for a Basquiat painting was made in 2007, when an untitled Basquiat work from 1981 sold at Sotheby's in New York for US$14.6 million. In 2008, at another auction at Christie's, Ulrich sold a 1982 Basquiat piece, "Untitled (Boxer)", for US$13,522,500 to an anonymous telephone bidder. In 2012, for the second year running, Basquiat was the most coveted contemporary (i.e. born after 1945) artist at auction, with €80 million in overall sales. That year, his "Untitled" (1981), a painting of a haloed, black-headed man with a bright red skeletal body, depicted amid the artist's signature scrawls, was sold by Robert Lehrman for $16.3 million, well above its $12 million high estimate. A similar untitled piece, also undertaken in 1981 and formerly owned by the Israel Museum, sold for £12.92 million at Christie's London, setting a world auction record for Basquiat's work. In 2013, Basquiat's piece "Dustheads" sold for $48.8 million at Christie's. In 2016 an untitled piece sold at Christie's for $57.3 million to a Japanese businessman and collector, Yusaku Maezawa.
Steven A. Cohen
In 2006, Cohen attempted to make the most expensive art purchase in history when he offered to purchase Picasso's "Le Rêve" from casino mogul Steve Wynn for $139 million. Just days before the painting was to be transported to Cohen, Wynn, who suffers from poor vision due to retinitis pigmentosa, accidentally thrust his elbow through the painting while showing it to a group of acquaintances inside of his office at Wynn Las Vegas. The purchase was canceled, and Wynn still held the painting until early November 2012, when Cohen finally acquired the painting for $150 million.
Hermia and Lysander (painting)
The painting achieved a sale price of £42,470 when auctioned in New York by Sotheby's in May 2012, a record price for work by this artist. It had previously been auctioned by Sotheby's in London on 19 June 1984 and a decade later by Sotheby's, New York, on 25 May 1994, when it was wrongly attributed to Julius Simmons.
Han van Meegeren
The painting was purchased by The Rembrandt Society for fl.520.000 (€235.000 or about €4.640.000 today),To obtain the relative present day value in Euro's, the amount in Dutch Guilders was given for the year 1938 at inflation calculator from/to Guilders or Euro's. with the aid of wealthy shipowner Willem van der Vorm, and donated to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. In 1938, the piece was highlighted in a special exhibition at the Rotterdam museum, along with 450 Dutch masterpieces dating from 1400–1800. A. Feulner wrote in the "Magazine for [the] History of Art", "In the rather isolated area in which the Vermeer picture hung, it was as quiet as in a chapel. The feeling of the consecration overflows on the visitors, although the picture has no ties to ritual or church."
In the summer of 1938, van Meegeren moved to Nice, using the proceeds from the sale of "The Supper at Emmaus" to buy a 12-bedroom estate at Les Arènes de Cimiez. On the walls of the estate hung several genuine Old Masters. Two of his better forgeries were made here, "Interior with Cardplayers" and "Interior with Drinkers", both displaying the signature of Pieter de Hooch. During his time in Nice, he painted his "Last Supper I" in the style of Vermeer.
Rembrandt in Southern California
In 1965, Norton Simon, a Southern California businessman and major Los Angeles County Museum of Art supporter, purchased Rembrandt's "Titus" at a Christie's London auction. The result was a media commotion. The painting had been knocked down by the auctioneer to an English buyer, but Simon was able to reopen the bidding by producing a letter that proved that the auctioneer had overlooked his prearranged bidding signal. A natural genius at promotion and marketing, Simon arranged the Rembrandt portrait's American debut at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where its debarkation from the plane was filmed for posterity. Stating that "the painting has such great beauty and universal appeal that the Norton Simon Foundation has a special obligation to exhibit it in the most favorable circumstances for the widest possible enjoyment," Simon allowed the work to be on view there for six months, where it was seen by over 300,000 visitors. That June, Simon and the Rembrandt picture made the cover of "Time Magazine". Disguised as a wrapped Christmas present and featuring a tag reading "To Mother," "Titus" made the plane trip from DC to Southern California in December 1965
Penrhyn Castle
It houses one of the finest art collections in Wales, with works by artists such as Canaletto, Richard Wilson, Carl Haag, Perino del Vaga, and Palma Vecchio. The collection formerly included a Rembrandt - ("Catrina Hooghsaet", valued at up to £40 million; the Dutch Culture Ministry tried to buy the painting for Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum in 2007, but could not meet the asking price). The family began collecting paintings from the early years of the 19th century; this significant collection was catalogued by the 2nd Lord Penrhyn's daughter Alice Douglas-Pennant.
David Geffen
In October 2006, Geffen sold two paintings by Jasper Johns and a De Kooning from his collection for a combined sum of $143.5 million. On November 3, 2006, "The New York Times" reported that Geffen had sold Pollock's 1948 painting "No. 5, 1948" from his collection for $140 million (£73.35 million) to Mexican financier David Martinez. Martinez is the founder of London-based Fintech Advisory Ltd, a financial house that specializes in buying Third World debt. The sale made "No. 5, 1948" the most expensive painting ever sold (outstripping the $134 million paid in October 2006 for Gustav Klimt's portrait "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I," purchased by cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder).
Ryoei Saito
He was noted for his purchase of expensive art. Specifically, at consecutive auctions by Christie's and Sotheby's in New York in mid May 1990, Saito bought Van Gogh's "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" and Renoir's Bal du moulin de la Galette for $82.5 and $78.1 million, repectively. At the time, these were the two most expensive paintings sold, either at auction or through private sales. Taking inflation in account, they remained the two most expensive paintings until the private sale of Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I in June 2006. It took 25 years before Saito's public auction price was broken, through the sale of Picasso's Les Femmes d'Alger ("Version O") at Christie's, New York, in May 2015.
Robert Donati
Ferrara was indicted on racketeering and murder charges around the beginning of 1990 and arrested shortly afterwards. Shortly after 1 a.m. on March 18, thieves disguised as police officers convinced security guards at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston to let them in, whereupon they bound the two men up and spent the next several hours removing 13 works, including "Storm on the Sea of Galilee", Rembrandt's only known seascape, as well as the finial that Donati had indicated an interest in. The stolen works have collectively been valued at $500 million, making it the highest-value art theft ever.
Le Rêve (Picasso)
"Le Rêve" was purchased for $7,000 in 1941 by Victor and Sally Ganz of New York City. This purchase began their 50-year collection of works by just five artists: Picasso, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Eva Hesse. After the Ganzes died (Victor in 1987 and Sally in 1997), their collection, including "Le Rêve", was sold at Christie's auction house on November 11, 1997, as a means of settling their inheritance tax bill. "Le Rêve" sold for an unexpectedly high $48.4 million, at the time the fourth most expensive painting sold (tenth when taking inflation into account). The entire collection set a record for the sale of a private collection, bringing $206.5 million. The total amount paid by the Ganzes over their lifetime of collecting these pieces was around $2 million.
Self-Portrait with Palette (Manet)
On 7 May 2010, it was announced that Cohen had decided to auction the painting at Sotheby's on 22 June 2010. The price was expected to be between $30.1 and $45.2 million. These expectations were not met, however, and the painting sold for £22,441,250 ($29.48 million) to the New York collector Franck Giraud. The price was nevertheless a record for a Manet painting.
Pablo Picasso
Several paintings by Picasso rank among the most expensive paintings in the world. "Garçon à la pipe" sold for US$104 million at Sotheby's on 4 May 2004, establishing a new price record. "Dora Maar au Chat" sold for US$95.2 million at Sotheby's on 3 May 2006. On 4 May 2010, "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust" was sold at Christie's for $106.5 million. The 1932 work, which depicts Picasso's mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter reclining and as a bust, was in the personal collection of Los Angeles philanthropist Frances Lasker Brody, who died in November 2009. On 11 May 2015 his painting "Women of Algiers" set the record for the highest price ever paid for a painting when it sold for US$179.3 million at Christie's in New York.
List of most expensive paintings
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 $44.4 million (equivalent to $ million in ).
List of most expensive paintings
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$100 million on December 14, 1962. Taking inflation into account, the 1962 value would be around US$ million in .
Gustav Klimt
On August 7, 2006, Christie's auction house announced it was handling the sale of the remaining four works by Klimt that were recovered by Maria Altmann and her co-heirs after their long legal battle against Austria (see "Republic of Austria v. Altmann"). Maria Altmann's fight to regain her family's paintings has been the subject of a number of documentary films, including "Adele's Wish". Her struggle also became the subject of the dramatic film the "Woman in Gold", a movie inspired by "Stealing Klimt", the documentary featuring Maria Altmann herself. The portrait of "Adele Bloch-Bauer II" was sold at auction in November 2006 for $88 million, the third-highest priced piece of art at auction at the time. "The Apple Tree I" (c. 1912) sold for $33 million, "Birch Forest" (1903) sold for $40.3 million, and "Houses in Unterach on Lake Atter" (1916) sold for $31 million. Collectively, the five restituted paintings netted more than $327 million. The painting "Litzlberg am Attersee" was auctioned for $40.4 million at Sotheby's in November 2011.
Portrait of Jan Six
Hofstede de Groot also mentioned this painting in his introduction as one of the 6 finest portraits made by Rembrandt: "When Rembrandt had become one of the most famous painters of his century -- as Orlers says as early as 1641 -- and people had to stoop to 
entreaty if they would be painted by him, he could impose his own terms instead of having them dictated by others. He could light his models in the way that seemed to him most beautiful; he could adorn them in the manner that he thought appropriate to their character, indicate to them the best pose to take, and determine the degree of finish in the execution. 
Free from all external hindrances, he could then create; he no longer aimed at securing so exact a likeness of his sitter. Thus there came into existence masterpieces such as the portraits of the married couples in the collection of the Duke of Westminster (748 and 864) and in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, formerly in the collection of B. Altman (755 and 869), the "Nicolaes Bruyningh " at Cassel (628), and above all the "Jan Six" at Amsterdam (712), perhaps the finest and most expressive of all."
Pendant portraits of Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit
The pendant portraits of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit are a pair of full-length wedding portraits by Rembrandt. They were painted on the occasion of the marriage of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit in 1634. Formerly owned by the Rothschild family, they became joinedly owned by the Louvre Museum and the Rijksmuseum in 2015 after both museums managed to contribute half of the purchase price of €160 million, a record for works by Rembrandt.
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
On September 4, 1972, the museum was the site of the largest art theft in Canadian history, when armed thieves made off with jewellery, figurines and 18 paintings worth a total of $2 million at the time (approximately $ million today), including works by Delacroix, Gainsborough and a rare Rembrandt landscape ("Landscape with Cottages"). One painting, believed at the time to have been a Jan Brueghel the Elder but later reattributed to one of his students, was returned by the thieves as a way of opening ransom negotiations; the rest have never been recovered. The thieves likewise have never been identified, although there is at least one informal suspect. In 2003, "The Globe and Mail" estimated that the Rembrandt alone would be worth $1 million.
Leonardo da Vinci
A painting by Leonardo, "Salvator Mundi", depicting Jesus Christ holding an orb sold for a world record $450.3 million at a Christie's auction in New York, 15 November 2017. The highest price previously paid for a work of art at auction was for Pablo Picasso's "Les Femmes d'Alger", which sold for $179.4 million in May 2015 at Christie's New York. The highest known sale price for any artwork was $300 million, for Willem de Kooning's "Interchange", sold privately in September 2015 by the David Geffen Foundation to hedge fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin.Footnotes
Citations
Gustav Klimt
In 2006, the 1907 portrait, "Adele Bloch-Bauer I", was purchased for the Neue Galerie New York by Ronald Lauder reportedly for US $135 million, surpassing Picasso's 1905 "Boy With a Pipe" (sold May 5, 2004 for $104 million), as the highest reported price ever paid for a painting up to that point.
Nu couché
The painting realized $170,405,000 at a Christie's New York sale on 9 November 2015, a record for a Modigliani painting and placing it high among the most expensive paintings ever sold. The purchaser was the Chinese businessman Liu Yiqian.. Liu is believed to have paid for the painting using his American Express card.
Guennol Lioness
At the time of its 2007 sale, the price paid at auction for "The Guennol Lioness" was the highest paid for a sculpture to that date, easily exceeding the record of Pablo Picasso's "Tete de femme (Dora Maar)". On 3 February 2010, however, the second edition of the cast of the sculpture "L'Homme qui marche I" ("Walking Man I") by Alberto Giacometti sold for £65,001,250 ($104,327,006) and surpassed "The Guennol Lioness" as the most expensive sculpture ever sold at auction.
Willem de Kooning
The painting by Leonardo which displaced the de Kooning oil work as the most expensive painting sold was "Salvator Mundi", depicting Jesus Christ holding an orb, sold for a world record $450.3 million at a Christie's auction in New York on 15 November 2017. The highest price previously paid for a work of art at auction was for Pablo Picasso's "Les Femmes d'Alger", which sold for $179.4 million in May 2015 at Christie's New York.
Rachel Ruysch
Ruysch enjoyed great fame and reputation in her lifetime. When she died in 1750, eleven poets paid her their respects with poems about her. In the 17th century the Dutch were very interested in flowers and gardening, so paintings that highlighted the beauty of nature were highly valued. This helped to build and maintain Ruysch's clientele throughout her career. In her lifetime her paintings were sold for very high prices of up to 750-1200 guilders. In comparison, Rembrandt rarely received more than 500 guilders for a painting in his lifetime.
David Thomson, 3rd Baron Thomson of Fleet
In 2002, Thomson and his father paid a world record price of $76.7 million to acquire Rubens' "Massacre of the Innocents", now the centrepiece of the Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario. In 2012, Thomson shattered records buying a painting by Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershoi, "Ida Reading a Letter", paying the highest price ever for a Danish artist. In 2012, Thomson broke the record for the most expensive 18th-century British watercolour when he paid £2.4 million for a small landscape by John Robert Cozens.
Robert King Wittman
Theft from the Swedish National Museum in Stockholm. Recovery: Rembrandt's 1630 "Self-Portrait" valued at $36 million. The small self-portrait on copper by Rembrandt stolen in an armed robbery in December 2000 was recovered in Copenhagen. Four men were arrested in a hotel in the Danish capital. The painting was undamaged and in its frame.
List of most expensive cars sold at auction
A 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO, serial number 3413GT, sold at RM Sotheby's Auction on August 25, 2018 for US $48,405,000 (including buyer's premium). This broke the record previously held by another 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO, serial number 3851GT, which sold for a then-record $38,115,000 (including buyer's premium) at Bonham's Quail Auction on August 14, 2014. While collectible cars have been sold privately for more, this is the highest price ever paid for a car at a public auction.
Bethsabée de Rothschild
Through a trust, she had inherited part of a major art collection assembled by her grandfather Baron Alphonse James de Rothschild. This included a 17th-century oil painting by Rembrandt and other Old Master paintings as well as Islamic and Venetian glass, decorative objects and porcelain, and Renaissance-style jewelry. Following her death, the collections were auctioned off. Rembrandt's "Portrait of a Lady" was sold by Christie's in London to the Dutch art dealer Robert Noortman for a record price of US$28.7 million. A 13th-century Mamluk jug in pristine condition sold for £3,307,750 (US$4.8 million), a world record for Islamic glass, and two mosque lamps for £1,763,750 and £641,750.
Arthur Joseph Sulley
Sulley made history in the same year, 1911, by selling Rembrandt’s "The Mill", which the Berlin art luminary and museum director Wilhelm von Bode, called “the greatest picture in the world,” to Peter Widener for £100,000. This painting, which Sulley had taken from Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, Marquis of Lansdowne for Widener to buy, set a record price for a painting.
Jean-Paul Riopelle
On May 24, 2017 Riopelle's painting "Vent du nord" sold at auction for $7,438,750 (Can.) (including buyer's premium), the second-highest price to date for a Canadian work of art.
Jan Theuns
Jan Theuns was fascinated by the work of Rembrandt, Rubens and van Dyck. He studied their paintings at different museums in Antwerp and Rotterdam, and The Hague and even the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. He mastered the technique, color and composition of the 17th century artists. He often imitated Rembrandt’s portraits with such a dexterity that earned him the nickname of “Breda’s Rembrandt.” These skills accidentally got him into trouble with the law in 1927 when Theuns was involved in a scandal. In 1909 Mr. Duynstee, an antique collector from Delft, bought in Breda for 10 guilders the painting of an old rabbi (similar to Rembrandt’s "Portrait of Jacob Trip" c. 1661, held by the National Gallery, London). Eighteen years later, Mr. Duynstee sold it for 70,000 guilders as a Rembrandt. The cleaning of the painting and later a technical investigation by authoritative Rembrandt scholars Dr. Abraham Bredius and Caspar Niehaus revealed that “The rabbi” was not an original despite its striking similarity to Rembrandt’s work and a mysterious forged signature now appearing in the painting. Jan Theuns alleged that he never sold the painting as a Rembrandt, that he sold it for a small amount of money, and that someone else added the forged signature to his work. Theuns never signed these early “Rembrandts” and only did so after the scandal. He was not a criminal master forger (this is an intentional malicious one) as his famous contemporary Han van Meegeren, just a mater copyist. Jan Theuns maintained his innocence until his death in 1961 but this affair followed him throughout his life and made him world-famous–especially post-war--- as Rembrandt copyist. Such notoriety translated into many commissions of these “Rembrandt-heads” as he called them (according to his daughter Diny Ladner). Everywhere there were customers for such work. Theuns reputation reached from Cape Town to Rio de Janeiro. He continued to copy and imitate Rembrandt (and other 17th century painters) but since his copies were really difficult to distinguish from the originals he decided to sign them J. Theuns.
List of most expensive paintings
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. Prices realised for just his nine paintings listed below, when adjusted for inflation to 2017, add up to over $900 million.
Orange, Red, Yellow
This surpassed the 2007 record price for a Rothko work of $72.8 million set when David Rockefeller sold "White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose)". The hammer price was $77.5 million, and the price was $86.8 million including buyer's premium. It established a new record for post-war/contemporary art at a public auction, when ignoring inflation. The highest price paid for a post-war painting in a private sale is believed to be $140 million (~$160 million in May 2012 dollars) for Jackson Pollock's "No. 5, 1948" in November 2006. In constant dollars, the record price for post-war art at a public auction remained with "Triptych, 1976" by Francis Bacon, sold at Sotheby's for $86.3 million in May 2008 (~$92 million in May 2012 dollars).
Portrait of Petronella Buys
This painting is one of the few Rembrandt paintings to have a 17th-century provenance, though it lacks a continuous 18th-century provenance. The painting remained in the Specx family, documented as being in the collection of their daughter Maria in 1655. It is then next documented as being sold from the collection of the art dealer C.S. Roos in 1820, whose son C.F. Roos continued the dealership and bought it back in 1830. It was exhibited in the collection of the art dealer Katz in 1938 and was subsequently in the collections of André Meyer and Wildenstein & Co. In 2017 it was sold from the divided estate of Paul-Louis Weiller for GBP 3,368,750.
Ryūsei Kishida
In December 2000, one of his portraits "Reiko a shawl on her shoulders" was sold for 360 million Yen, the highest price ever achieved in auction for a Japanese painting.
Vandalism of art
Rembrandt's "Night Watch" (1642) is one of the most popular paintings at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It is viewed by about 4,000 to 5,000 visitors daily with its value estimated at $925,000 in the 1970s. The painting was vandalized on several occasions. On 13 January 1911, an unemployed navy cook tried to cut it with a knife, but could not cut through the thick varnish on the painting. In 1975, William de Rijk, an unemployed school teacher, cut dozens of zigzag lines in the painting with a knife before he was wrestled by the guards. The day before, de Rijk had been turned away from the museum because he arrived after closing time. After the event, he was identified with a mental disorder; he was sent to a psychiatric hospital and committed suicide there on 21 April 1976. It took six months to restore the painting, and traces of the cuts still remain. In 1990, a man threw acid on the painting. The guards managed to quickly dilute it with water so that it penetrated only the varnish layer, and the painting was restored again.
Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino
On 7 July 2010, the painting was sold at auction for £29.7 million, which broke the artist's auction record. The painting sold in five minutes and was purchased in the room by the dealer, Hazlitt Gooden and Fox who were acting on behalf of the Getty Museum. The price became the highest paid for a Turner work up to that date – this was later beaten by "Rome, From Mount Aventine" in December 2014, which sold for £30.3m. The United Kingdom's Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest stated the painting was of "outstanding aesthetic importance" and recommended putting the export bar in place. Culture minister Ed Vaizey accepted this recommendation and put the bar in place on 3 November 2010 to last until 2 February 2011, with a possible extension to 2 August 2011. The bar initially saw little attention in the British press, though one writer for "The Daily Telegraph" opposed it.
Les Noces de Pierrette
The painting was owned by the Swedish investment banker and mecenat Fredrik Roos when it was sold at Binoche et Godeau in Paris on November 30, 1989. The buyer, Tomonori Tsurumaki, a real-estate developer, investment banker and owner of Autopolis racetrack, purchased the painting for the sum of $51,670,000, making it one of the world's most expensive paintings.
Betsey Cushing Roosevelt Whitney
Betsey also made art auction history in 1990 by putting up for sale, by Sotheby's, one of Renoir's most famous paintings, the sun-dappled cafe scene "Bal au moulin de la Galette, Montmartre". It brought $78.1 million, then a record auction price for Impressionist art and the second-highest price for any artwork sold at auction. After her death, her art collection was sold at Sotheby's in 1999 for a then record $128.3 million, "the second-highest single-owner auction in history."
Rembrandt Research Project
As a result of the project, which analyzed documentation, techniques, and forensic research on Rembrandt paintings from his early years in Leiden until his death, the number of signed Rembrandt "self-portraits" around the world has been reduced by half. Also, more paintings have been attributed to students working in the Rembrandt studio, and more has been discovered about the ways in which the students worked. Recently, period copies of Rembrandt paintings are being studied for clues as to whether certain copies were factory-style pieces for visiting functionaries. Rembrandt's work was in high demand for decades, and he managed to keep productivity up while also keeping his prices high by enforcing strict quality control on the work done in his studio.
Portrait of Omai
The painting was included in the estate of George Howard, Baron Howard of Henderskelfe when he died in November 1984. It was put on sale by his son, Simon Howard, to meet the costs of a divorce and to help with the running costs of the Castle Howard estate. Howard offered to sell the work to the Tate Gallery, but its suggested price of £5.5 million was rejected. Auctioned at Sotheby's in September 2001, the painting was bought by London art dealer Guy Morrison. The "Antiques Trade Gazette" suggested that Morrison had been subject to "Auction fever", i.e. getting carried away and bidding more than his private client had authorised him to. The hammer price of £9.4 million (sometimes quoted as £10.3 million) was a record for a work by Reynolds and then the second highest amount paid for a painting by a British artist (the record was £10.7 million, paid for John Constable's "The Lock" in 1990, a level now substantially passed by another sale of "The Lock" in 2012 and by several sales of work by Francis Bacon, including his "Triptych, 1976" in 2008 and his "Three Studies of Lucian Freud" in 2013).
Mikhail Larionov
The highest price paid for a Larionov painting at auction is 2,200,000 British pounds.
Egon Schiele
On 21 June 2013 Auctionata in Berlin sold a watercolor from 1916, "Reclining Woman" at an online auction for €1.827 million (US $2.418 million). This is a world record for the most expensive work of art ever sold at an online auction.
Rhein II
In 2011, a print was auctioned for $4.3 million (then £2.7m), making it the most expensive photograph ever sold.
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri
Posthumously, Tjapaltjarri's works are drawing increasing attention. The artist's majestic painting "Warlugulong" (previously bought by the Commonwealth Bank for just $1,200) was auctioned by Sotheby's on 24 July 2007. Pre-auction, the work was expected to make art history as the most expensive Aboriginal canvas at auction. The work had been tipped to fetch up to A$2.5 million, more than double the then-record for Aboriginal art at auction. The work, in fact, sold for $2.4 million; the following day, it was revealed that the National Gallery of Australia had been the buyer. The Gallery's purchase eased tensions of a rumoured Government legal intervention had the work been purchased by an overseas buyer, out of concern that significant indigenous art would be "lost" overseas.
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo is renowned primarily as a painter. The "Mona Lisa" is the most famous of his works and the most parodied portrait, and "The Last Supper" is the most reproduced religious painting of all time. His drawing of the "Vitruvian Man" is also regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on items as varied as the euro coin, textbooks, and T-shirts. His painting "Salvator Mundi" sold for $450.3 million at a Christie's auction in New York on 15 November 2017, the highest price ever paid for a work of art. Perhaps 15 of his paintings have survived. Nevertheless, these few works compose a contribution to later generations of artists rivalled only by that of his contemporary Michelangelo, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting.
The Icebergs
The painting was shipped to Sotheby's in New York City, where it was confirmed to be in excellent condition, needing only cleaning with soap and water, removal of varnish, and adjustments to the stretchers. The importance of the painting drew more sellers to Sotheby's planned auction, hoping to capitalize on the increasing interest in the semi-annual event. On October 25, 1979, eight to ten bidders participated in the auction of "The Icebergs", which lasted almost four minutes. Two telephone bidders remained at the $2 million mark, with the winning bid coming at $2.5 million. Not only was the amount the most ever paid at auction for an American painting—which had been set the year before, at $980,000 for George Caleb Bingham's "—"but it was the third-highest amount paid for any painting at auction. "The Icebergs"' record for an American painting stood until 1985, when Rembrandt Peale's "Rubens Peale with a Geranium" sold for $3.7 million. The anonymous buyers of "The Icebergs" put it on long-term loan with the Dallas Museum of Art, and soon donated it outright. The buyers were identified in 2010 as businessman Lamar Hunt and his wife Norma, who had been equivocal on the subject in 1979, although contemporary reporting was quite certain. According to a 1980 magazine piece, Mair Baulch did not receive any of the sale proceeds to improve her facility, although Harvey, writing in 2002, noted that the council "eventually" purchased the property that Baulch was interested in.
Three Studies of Lucian Freud
On 12 November 2013, the triptych sold for 142.4 million (including the buyer's premium) to Elaine Wynn at Christie's New York auction house, nominally becoming the most expensive work of art ever to be sold at auction. When inflation is taken into account, a higher price was reached at the same auction house for Van Gogh's "Portrait of Dr. Gachet", which in 1990 sold for $ million current dollars. Bacon's triptych did surpass the constant dollar record of $119.9 million set by the fourth version of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" in May 2012. The 2013 sale also represents the highest price paid for a work by a British or Irish artist, beating Bacon's "Triptych 1976", which fetched $86.3 million in May 2008.
Neue Galerie New York
In 2006, Lauder purchased Klimt's painting "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" from Maria Altmann on behalf of the Neue Galerie. Citing a confidentiality agreement, Lauder would only confirm that the purchase price was more than the last record price of US$104.2 million US for Picasso's 1905 "Boy With a Pipe". The press reported the price for the Klimt at US$135 million, which would make it at that time the most expensive painting ever sold. It has been on display at the museum since July 2006.
Josignacio
On March 10, 2016, a painting by Josignacio titled "Music is Timeless", dated 1989, was sold for a hammer price of US$3,481,205 at McCarthy-Williams Auctions in London. This painting is now the most expensive painting in the world by a living Latin artist (as well as a living Cuban artist).
Amedeo Modigliani
"Nu couché" realized $170,405,000 at a Christie's, New York, sale on 9 November 2015, a record for a Modigliani painting and placing it high among the most expensive paintings ever sold.
On a trip to Nice which had been conceived and organized by Zborowski, Modigliani, Foujita and other artists tried to sell their works to rich tourists. Modigliani managed to sell a few pictures, but only for a few francs each. Despite this, during this time he produced most of the paintings that later became his most popular and valued works.