The short answer and the catch
The record for a painting is $450,312,500. That is what Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi cost its buyer at Christie's in New York on 15 November 2017, after 19 minutes of bidding between two parties, according to NBC News. The gavel came down at $400 million. The extra $50,312,500 is the auction house's fees, which the buyer pays on top, as Wikipedia's account of the sale spells out.
"Most expensive" has at least three defensible meanings, and each crowns a different painting or a different number.
Three ways to read "most expensive"
Public auctions leave a paper trail. Private sales do not, and their figures usually reach the press through a person who was close to the deal. Insurance valuations are a third kind of number, set by a museum or an insurer for a specific purpose. Putting them in one table shows how different their evidence is.
| Definition | Holder | Figure | How solid is the number |
|---|---|---|---|
| Public auction | Salvator Mundi (Leonardo, c. 1500) | $450,312,500 (15 Nov 2017) | Reported by the auction house and the press, includes fees |
| Reported private sale | Interchange (de Kooning, 1955) | $300 million (sold 2015, reported Feb 2016) | Reported by CNN from a person close to the deal, not confirmed by the parties |
| Reported private sale | The Card Players (Cézanne, 1892/93) | $250 million or more (2011) | Vanity Fair reported it in 2012 (relayed by Art Observed), and estimates range up to about $320 million |
| Insurance valuation | Mona Lisa (Leonardo da Vinci) | $100 million (14 Dec 1962) | A valuation for a loan, not a sale |
On the auction definition there is one clear answer. On the private-sale definition the ranking is not settled, because Wikipedia says the Cézanne price has been variously estimated between $250 million and $320 million, and the de Kooning figure of $300 million sits inside that range. Anyone who ranks those two against each other is choosing between unconfirmed numbers.
The insurance figure explains why the Mona Lisa turns up in these conversations without ever having been sold. Guinness World Records lists the $100 million (53.55 million pounds) valuation assessed on 14 December 1962 for the painting's trip to the United States. It measures the cost of losing the picture, and nobody paid it.
The record ladder, five rungs
Here are five landmark prices, in date order. The table skips several intermediate records, so the last column compares each price with the 1990 auction price of $82.5 million, and not with whichever painting held the record just before it.
| Year | Painting | Reported price | Sale type | Multiple of the 1990 price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1987 | Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers, van Gogh | 24.75 million pounds | Auction, Christie's London | Priced in pounds, so no multiple |
| 1990 | Portrait of Dr. Gachet, van Gogh | $82.5 million | Auction, Christie's New York | 1.0× |
| 2011 | The Card Players, Cézanne | $250 million or more | Private sale | 3.0× or more |
| 2015 | Interchange, de Kooning | $300 million (reported) | Private sale | 3.6× |
| 2017 | Salvator Mundi, Leonardo | $450.3 million | Auction, Christie's New York | 5.5× |
Wikipedia says the 1987 van Gogh sale tripled the previous record and opened a new era in top prices. From the 1990 rung to the 2017 rung, the price grew 5.46 times in 27 and a half years. Compounded, that is about 6.4% a year in nominal dollars, and the figure is before any adjustment for inflation. The largest step between neighbouring rungs is 1990 to 2011, a factor of about three over 21 years.
Wikipedia's entry on The Card Players says the 2011 price marked the highest ever paid for a painting and stood until November 2017. The reported $300 million for Interchange falls inside the estimate range for the Cézanne, which is why the two private sales are hard to rank against each other. The 2017 auction gave the first confirmed public figure above both, at 1.5 times the reported Interchange price.
What the number includes
Auction prices are quoted with fees in some places and without in others, which is why two lists of the same sales can disagree. Two sales in this article let you see the fee arithmetic. Christie's sold van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet for $82.5 million in May 1990, which Wikipedia breaks down as $75 million plus a 10 percent commission. Multiply and it checks: 75 × 1.10 = 82.5.
For Salvator Mundi the fees are $50,312,500 on a $400 million hammer price, or 12.6% of the hammer. The $400 million is the hammer price, and the buyer's total came to $450.3 million with fees. The private sales in the table have no disclosed fee structure at all, which is another reason not to rank them precisely against auction results.
One painting, four prices
Salvator Mundi shows how far one panel's price can move. In 1958 it appeared at Sotheby's in London as a work by Leonardo's follower Boltraffio and sold for 45 pounds, per Artnet's timeline of its ownership. Wikipedia adds that it stayed attributed to Boltraffio until 2011.
In 2013 the painting was sold by its owners to the dealer Yves Bouvier for $80 million, and Bouvier sold it on to the Russian collector Dmitry Rybolovlev for $127.5 million, a markup of about 59% on Wikipedia's figures. Wikipedia describes how that markup became the center of a legal dispute between Rybolovlev, Bouvier and Sotheby's. Rybolovlev then put the painting up at Christie's, where it sold in 2017 for 3.5 times what he had paid, about four and a half years later.
Laid out in order, the price was 45 pounds in 1958, then $80 million and $127.5 million in 2013, and $450.3 million in 2017. Between the first and last, the attribution moved from Boltraffio to Leonardo.
Sales with no public price
Any list of record prices leaves out the sales nobody announced. Wikipedia's list notes that it is incomplete for private transactions, because they are not always reported and the price may stay secret even when they are. Its two examples are a Caravaggio Judith and Holofernes bought privately in June 2019 by the hedge fund manager J. Tomilson Hill, where a confidentiality agreement kept the price undisclosed, and a 2019 sale of van Gogh's The Seated Zouave, which some sources put at $300 million but which none of the parties confirmed.
The highest confirmed price is $450.3 million. The highest price anyone has paid for a painting could be higher, and the sources that would settle it are private.
Is it really a Leonardo?
Christie's said in 2017 that most leading scholars consider the panel an original work by Leonardo. Wikipedia's summary adds that some specialists dispute this, proposing that he contributed only certain elements, and that others think extensive restoration prevents a firm attribution. Wikipedia records a 2011 meeting of scholars at which the attribution to Leonardo was agreed, which is the point where the painting stopped being catalogued as a Boltraffio.
The public record after the sale adds a question mark. In September 2018 Abu Dhabi's Department of Culture and Tourism announced that the unveiling planned for the Louvre Abu Dhabi was postponed indefinitely, and Artnet and Al Jazeera reported that no reason was given. Christie's and Saudi officials had said the buyer, Prince Badr bin Abdullah Al Saud, acted for the Abu Dhabi department, while The Wall Street Journal reported he was an intermediary for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Where a former record holder ended up
Van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet went to the Japanese businessman Ryoei Saito in 1990, who said he would have it cremated with him. The painting later changed hands privately. The Art Newspaper's 2019 investigation says the current owner remains unknown, and The Daily Beast reported that year that it had never been seen publicly again, nearly 30 years after the auction.
For more, see van Gogh paintings and famous paintings. For prices at the opposite end of the market, see whether Thomas Kinkade paintings are worth anything.
