Top Ten - Most Expensive Paintings Ever Sold

The Financial Times has an article on the top ten most expensive paintings, adjusted for inflation.  The number one painting is the reported sale of The Card Players by Cezanne for $254 million (adjusted for inflation) to the Qatar Royal family.  Although this sale has not been fully announced, it is assumed by most in the trade to be true, and that is why it was included in the list. Follow the link below for the full top ten.

The Financial Times reports 

The Top Ten list is remarkable in several other ways. It contains no work made before 1880. Until recently, a single Old Master made the cut: Rubens’s “Massacre of the Innocents”, painted in 1611 and sold in 2002 for $76.7m. For once the vendors – an Austrian family – were more mysterious than the buyer, who was Kenneth Thomson, the Canadian press baron who became Lord Thomson of Fleet. And we have excluded – since it was an institutional sale – Titian’s “Diana and Actaeon” (1556-59), acquired for the British nation in 2009 for £50m.

Very recent sales have seen the prices spiralling up. The most recent – which we have shoehorned into 10th place in our list, even though there are other (slightly shadowy) contenders for that slot, is Mark Rothko’s “Orange, Red, Yellow”, painted in 1961 and sold for just under $87m in New York last month.

The Rothko was a salesman’s dream. It had perfect provenance, acquired from Marlborough Fine Art in London in 1967 by David Pincus, one of the leading American collectors in the second half of the century, and came fresh as a daisy from the connoisseur’s estate without having sullied itself in the marketplace for a full 45 years.

The previous highest price paid at auction for a Rothko was “White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose)” sold in May 2007, for $72.8 million. The market was then climbing up to its highest peak just before the recession and sharp decline of 2008 – so the price-line of these Rothko records would, if drawn as a chart, neatly follow the general fortunes of the top echelons of the contemporary art market for those years. Up and up, down and down, then back up and – oh yes – up a bit more.

Source:  The Financial Times