Christie’s Historic and Unusual Auctions 1900–2026

Before the world even heard of paintings selling for tens of millions, Christie’s held the sale of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ studio (1794), Madame du Barry’s jewels (1795), the forty-day sale of the Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos’s collections at Stowe House (1848), and the seventeen-day sale of the Hamilton Palace paintings (1882). The pattern then was the same as it is today: a big name, the tension of the auction, and an object that has become a symbol of its time combine to create something that transcends the transaction itself.

Below, we revisit auctions that transcended collectors and entered the public consciousness—on the front pages of newspapers, on television news, and, in recent years, on-line. We begin at the beginning of the last century, when Christie’s first dedicated an entire auction to the memory of a single collector.

1919: One Man’s Collection as an Event in Its Own

Nine years after the death of Sir George Drummond, a Scottish industrialist and politician active in Canada, his collection of European paintings went under Christie’s hammer in London. The catalog included works by Courbet, Degas, Daumier, Rossetti, Constable, and Turner. While these names might not cause a stir today, in 1919, their mere presence in one collection was a rarity. Auction houses of the era typically sold mixed collections, comprised of the work of multiple owners. Dedicating a separate auction solely to the memory of a single collector was so unusual at the time that the auction house itself referred to it as one of its “historical auctions,” a category reserved for events outside its routine operations.

The significance of this auction for the institution’s history lies not only in the value of the individual paintings, but also in the formal precedent it set. Drummond was president of the Montreal Art Association, and his collection was considered one of the most important European art collections in Canada at the time. By selling it all in one piece, under a single banner and with an extensive catalog detailing the collector’s personality, Christie’s tested a format that would become standard a century later for every major auction of a single collection—from the Rockefellers to Agnes Gund. In other words, the modern “single-name auction,” so characteristic of media coverage in the 2010s and 2020s, had its prototype long before the advent of television, precisely at Christie’s.

1987: Flowers worth a fortune and the prelude to the boom

March 1987, Christie’s in London. One of the seven versions of Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” goes up for sale—a painting that the artist himself valued during his lifetime at the price of a pair of shoes at the time. Christie’s estimated the starting price at around 9.5 million pounds. The auction closed with 24.75 million pounds, nearly 40 million dollars—more than three times the previous record for any work of art sold at auction. Journalists were shocked: the Washington Post reported the price openly, which “astonished the packed hall,” and news agencies emphasized that the buyer wished to remain anonymous, although rumors almost immediately pointed to Japan.

The speculation was confirmed a few months later: the painting was purchased by the Japanese insurance company Yasuda Fire and Marine, initiating a wave of Japanese purchases of Western art that lasted until the end of the decade. The same transaction had another, much later, media collateral: in 2023, the heirs of a German-Jewish banker who had sold the painting under duress in 1934 while fleeing Nazi persecution sued for its return—a case that, almost forty years later, reminded the world again of the 1987 auction. It’s rare for a sale to return to the headlines twice, decades apart, each time for a completely different reason.

1990: A Lesson in Counting in Millions

Vincent van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” sold in May 1990 for more than twice the price of another painting by the same artist three years earlier. The $82.5 million price set a record for a single work of art sold at auction at the time. This figure evoked the same incredulity in the financial and cultural press—it was written about with the same astonishment one would describe currency exchange rates after a sudden market crash. The transaction fit into a broader context: Japanese industrialists and investors, taking advantage of the strength of the yen, were buying up Western masterpieces in droves at the time, and Van Gogh became the face of this phenomenon. This was the moment when the art market finally ceased to be a topic for connoisseurs and became a topic for readers of business sections.

The significance of that sale for Christie’s history lies not so much in the amount itself, but in the precedent it set: it demonstrated that a single work of art could become a global news story, comparable to events on Wall Street. From then on, every subsequent major auction at the house was reported in this vein—as a financial event, not a purely artistic one.

2011: An auction of a legend, not just stones

The December auction of Elizabeth Taylor’s collection in New York demonstrated a reverse mechanism to that of 1990. Here, the market value of individual items was predetermined—jewelry, dresses, letters, and personal items, not works of art with an established place in history. Instead, something else drove the price higher: the actress herself and the stories associated with each item.

La Peregrina, a pearl once purchased for a mere thirty-something dollars and worn by Spanish kings since the 16th century, came to Taylor as a Valentine’s Day gift from Richard Burton. Estimated at between two and three million dollars, it fetched $11.8 million – the bidding lasted, according to media reports, only a few minutes. A 33-carat diamond ring, also a gift from Burton, sold for $8.8 million, similarly understated. CBS News and Al Jazeera journalists reported prices that exceeded estimates many times over, while NPR correspondents highlighted the atmosphere of the venue – telephone bidding booths manned by house employees in evening gowns, accepting bids from around the world.

The entire collection—not just jewelry, but also dresses, paintings, and personal memorabilia—earned approximately $157 million, setting another auction record, this time for a private jewelry collection. This sale also perfectly illustrates the principle governing the market for symbolic goods: that an object multiplied by a story can achieve a value completely detached from its material.

2017: Leonardo da Vinci and the mysterious disappearance

In November 2017, “Salvator Mundi,” a painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, sold for $450.3 million—a sum that remains a record for a work of art sold at auction and likely will remain so for a long time. The bidding itself lasted nearly twenty minutes and was conducted by four representatives bidding by telephone, which was reported by nearly every news outlet worldwide at the time as an event in itself, regardless of the bid.

Doubts surrounded the painting from the outset: some art historians questioned Leonardo’s sole authorship, pointing to the possible involvement of the master’s workshop. The buyer’s identity remained unknown for several days after the auction, until media outlets determined the transaction was made on behalf of the heir to the Saudi throne. The painting was intended for a newly established museum in Abu Dhabi, but its public presentation was canceled without explanation, and the work has since disappeared from public view. This disappearance has fascinated investigative journalists for many years as a rare instance in which an auction story doesn’t end with the fall of the hammer but instead gains a second life as an unsolved mystery.

2018: Sale of the Peggy and David Rockefeller Collection

The collection of American royalty went under the hammer in the spring of 2018, bringing a total of $832.6 million, the highest ever for a private collection sold at auction. Christie’s described the Rockefellers as among the most significant collectors in the house’s history, and the sale included not only Impressionist paintings but also furniture, porcelain, family jewelry, and everyday objects amassed over decades.

Financial media outlets, including Fortune and CBS News, described the event not only in aesthetic terms. Their coverage emphasized the symbolic end of an era of American affluence, in which private collections were built in discreet isolation, only to be displayed for the world to see within days of their owners’ deaths. The sale of a Jackson Pollock painting or a Constantin Brâncuși sculpture in the same auction demonstrated how the scale of a single collection can overshadow the significance of individual works—the headlines then focused not on specific paintings, but on the sale price and the family name.

2020–2022: Million-Year-Old Fossils

October 2020 brought an event that demonstrated that a major Christie’s auction doesn’t have to be about art in the traditional sense. A Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton named Stan, discovered in South Dakota by an amateur paleontologist, sold for a record $31.8 million against a starting estimate of just $6 million to $8 million. NBC News reported the auction as a 20-minute duel between anonymous telephone bidders, and the transaction itself was described as the most expensive dinosaur fossil sale in history.

The scientific community’s reaction was swift and unequivocal: paleontologists raised the alarm that specimens of such high research value were ending up in private hands, rather than in museums whose budgets couldn’t compete with collectors. This sparked a conversation that would resurface two years later with a vengeance. In 2022, Christie’s planned to sell another tyrannosaurus specimen, named Shen, at an auction in Hong Kong—the first of its kind in Asia. A few days before the auction, the auction house withdrew the skeleton from the offering when paleontologist Peter Larson, citing analysis of photos and scans, estimated that up to 95 percent of Shen’s bones were actually copies of fragments from Stan—the same specimen sold two years earlier by the same house. CNN reported the case as the first high-profile case of questioning the authenticity of a fossil sold at auction, introducing a thread previously absent from mainstream media into the growing fossil market: suspicion of a reconstruction bordering on fraud.

The last dozen or so months: Christie’s and artificial intelligence

If there’s one auction from the last two or three years that sparked a reaction that reached far beyond art collectors, it’s “Augmented Intelligence”—the first sale in the history of a major auction house devoted exclusively to works created with the aid of artificial intelligence, held by Christie’s between February 20 and March 5, 2025, in New York.

The timing of the theme couldn’t have been more apt. The auction took place at the height of the artificial intelligence frenzy, which was simultaneously driving record valuations for technology companies on the stock market and giving the word “algorithm” a place in business media similar to that once held by internet stocks at the turn of the previous decade. Christie’s, a house 259 years old at that point, posed the very same question to the art market that investors were asking themselves on Wall Street: were we facing a lasting change, a passing fad, or—worse yet—a bubble?

The reaction was immediate and far from enthusiastic. Over thirty works—from pioneers of algorithmic art, like Harold Cohen, who died in 2016, to contemporary artists like Refik Anadol and Sougwen Chung, whose painting was created using a headband that recorded brainwaves and a robot that painted based on the data—went under the hammer amidst one of the most notorious controversies in recent years in the art world. An open letter, which, according to TechCrunch, garnered over 6,500 signatures from artists in just a few hours, accused the auction house of promoting works based on models trained on other people’s work without a license or compensation. Forbes and The Art Newspaper cited critics claiming that Christie’s was emphasizing tools that feed off the work of human creators without paying them anything.

But the auction house didn’t back down from its plans. The auction went ahead as scheduled, and its financial result—just under $729,000—was modest by the house’s standards, even symbolic compared to the sums previously described. However, the actual amount on the bill wasn’t the true measure of success. Christie’s was pleased to report that thirty-seven percent of registered bidders were completely new to the house, and nearly half of the participants were millennials and Gen Z—a demographic that traditional auction houses have been trying to reach for years without much success.

This is precisely what makes this auction the most interesting of the cases described here: the clash between the oldest institution in the art market and the most topical dispute of its time—copyright versus artificial intelligence—took place precisely at the moment when the same topic was shaping financial headlines worldwide. The controversy didn’t damage the overall image; on the contrary, it generated publicity many times greater than the value of the transaction itself and attracted an audience to a house founded in the 18th century that would have been previously unimaginable in its halls.

What do a pearl, a lost painting, bones, and an algorithm have in common?

The auctions described here, juxtaposed side by side, have one thing in common: the auction item itself was essentially a pretext in each. The real commodity remained a story—about a movie star, about the mystery of authorship, about a scientific dispute, about anxiety about new technology. For decades, Christie’s has consciously built this into an event: traveling exhibitions preceding major auctions, carefully planned press campaigns, and sometimes, as the example of “Augmented Intelligence” demonstrates, even deliberately entering into controversy, which generates more publicity than a calm, trouble-free sale. Criticism doesn’t harm the outcome—it becomes part of the house’s operating model, as is most clearly seen in the most contentious of the transactions described here.

As we can see, true luxury these days is less and less about owning an object and more and more often about the opportunity to participate in a story that will be talked about for a long time to come. And this has been the strength of the Christie’s auction house brand since 1766. Only the prop on the stage changes: once it was Van Gogh, today it’s an algorithm, and tomorrow—judging by recent decades—it will be something we can’t even imagine today.

Record-breaking Christie’s auctions

The comparison deliberately contrasts the scale: from nearly half a billion dollars for a single painting to less than a million for the entire auction, which dominated headlines for several weeks anyway. This is the best proof that media attention and transaction value can be completely independent measures.

Sources

• Britannica Money – Christie’s: History, Art Sales & Facts
• MyArtBroker – A History of Christie’s Auction House
• Fortune – Record-setting art sales of a half-century (2014)
• CBS News – Report from the Elizabeth Taylor collection auction (December 2011)
• NPR – Elizabeth Taylor’s Jewels Bring Millions (2011)
• Forbes – Elizabeth Taylor Auction Shatters Records, Fetches Nearly $116 Million (2011)
• Al Jazeera – Elizabeth Taylor’s jewelry sells for $115m (2011)
• NBC News – One of largest known T. Rex skeletons sells for record $31.8 million (2020)
• CNN – Christie’s withdraws T. rex skeleton from Hong Kong auction days before sale (2022)
• Artnet News – Christie’s Pulled a $25 Million T-Rex Skeleton From Auction After Experts Pointed Out That Most of Its Bones Are Replicas (2022)
• The Art Newspaper – Christie’s AI art auction outpaces expectations, bringing in more than $728,000 (March 2025)
• ARTnews – Christie’s AI Art Sale Defies Controversy, Surpasses Expectations (March 2025)
• Forbes – Christie’s AI-Generated Art Auction: Who Profits And Who Pays The Price (February 2025)
• Forbes – First Christie’s Auction Devoted Exclusively To AI Art Sparks Backlash (February 2025)
• TechCrunch – Report on the open letter against the “Augmented Intelligence” auction (February 2025)
• The Conversation / HASTA, University of St Andrews – background analysis of the controversy surrounding AI auctions
• Ocula – Christie’s Nets $1.1bn with Record-Filled New York Sale (market data, 2026)
• ArtCollection.io – The history of auction houses: Christie’s

Image: CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LTD. 2025