page_title: List of most expensive paintings
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: List of most expensive paintings / Background
caption_attribution_description: the only painting Vincent van Gogh is certainly known to have sold during his lifetime.
context_page_description: This is a list of the highest known prices paid for paintings. The current record price is approximately US$450 million paid for Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi in November 2017.
context_section_description: 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 Leonardo 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$850 million in 2019.
  The earliest sale on the list below (Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh) is from March 1987; with a price of £24.75 million (£70.1 million in 2019 currency). This sale tripled the previous record, and introduced a new era in top art sales. Before this, the highest absolute price paid for a painting was £8.1 million (£19.3 million in 2019 currency) paid by the J. Paul Getty Museum for Andrea Mantegna's Adoration of the Magi at Christie's in London on April 18, 1985. In constant dollars, the highest price paid before 1987 was by the National Gallery of Art when in February 1967 they acquired Leonardo da Vinci's Ginevra de' Benci for around $5 million ($38 million in 2019 dollars) from the Princely Family of Liechtenstein. The sale of Van Gogh's Sunflowers was the first time a "modern" (in this case 1888) painting became the record holder, as opposed to the old master paintings which previously had dominated the market. In contrast, there are currently only nine pre-1875 paintings among the listed top 89, and none created between 1635 and 1874.
  An exceptional case is graffiti artist David Choe, who accepted payment in shares for painting graffiti art in the headquarters of a fledgling Facebook. His shares were of limited value when he was given them, but by the time of Facebook's IPO they were valued at around $200m.
  The list is incomplete with respect to sales between private parties, as these are not always reported and, even if they are, details like the purchase price may remain secret. For example, on 25 June 2019, the American hedge fund manager J. Tomilson Hill bought a recently rediscovered Judith and Holofernes (1607) attributed to Caravaggio, two days before it would have been auctioned in Toulouse. Though the Louvre Museum had turned down the opportunity to purchase it for €100 million, the painting was estimated to sell for $110 to $170 million. The actual purchase price was not disclosed, because of a confidentiality agreement attached to the private sale.
caption: The Red Vineyard (1888), the only painting Vincent van Gogh sold during his lifetime
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