The 20 Most Expensive Paintings Ever Sold, Ranked

Nineteen minutes. That's how long two bidders needed on November 15, 2017, to push a picture of Christ to $450.3 million at Christie's in New York. Nothing has come close since. Below are the 20 most expensive paintings ever sold, ranked by the price paid in US dollars, with the year, the buyer where it's public, and whether the deal happened under a hammer or behind a closed door.

A word on method before the numbers. Auction prices include the buyer's fees and are public to the dollar. Private sales are rounded figures that leaked through lawsuits, museum budgets and the buyers themselves, so treat them as close, not exact. And a price tag tells you little about fame: most of the paintings people most want on their own walls have never been for sale at all.

The full ranking

Prices are nominal. Nobody has adjusted them for inflation, which is why a 2006 sale can look modest next to a 2025 one.

Number one, by a distance

1. Salvator Mundi, Leonardo da Vinci ($450.3 million, 2017)

In 1958 this picture changed hands for £45. It had vanished for more than a century before it resurfaced in 2005, and it went to the Russian collector Dmitry Rybolovlev for $127.5 million in 2013. Four years later the hammer fell at $400 million, and with fees the final bill came to $450,312,500. The buyer was later named as Prince Badr bin Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

Why so much? Fewer than 20 paintings by Leonardo survive, and this was the last one in private hands. Scarcity did the rest. Look at the blessing Christ with his crystal orb and then at the handful of other Leonardos, all locked in museums, and the price starts to make a strange kind of sense.

Two to six: the private deals and a Klimt

2. Interchange, Willem de Kooning (about $300 million, 2015)

Ken Griffin bought this 1955 abstraction from the David Geffen Foundation, together with the Pollock at number six, for roughly $500 million in one deal. In 1989 the same de Kooning had sold for $20.7 million. Both paintings went on view at the Art Institute of Chicago.

3. The Card Players, Paul Cézanne (about $250 million, 2011)

This canvas is one of a series of five, and it belonged to the estate of the Greek shipowner George Embiricos. Dealers offered more than $220 million; the royal family of Qatar paid about $250 million without haggling. Two peasants, a bottle, a table. It's the quietest picture in this list, and the two men bent over their cards still look like they have all afternoon.

4. Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, Gustav Klimt ($236.4 million, 2025)

This is the newest name near the top, and the most expensive painting ever sold at Sotheby's. On November 18, 2025, bidding opened at $130 million and closed 20 minutes later between two phone bidders, more than doubling Klimt's previous auction record of $108.8 million.

The story behind it is darker than the colors. Elisabeth came from a Jewish family of Viennese collectors. After 1938 she claimed Klimt was her real father, using the portrait as evidence, and it kept her alive in Vienna until 1944. The Nazis seized the painting; it went back to the family in 1948, and Leonard Lauder bought it in 1985 and hung it in his dining room. "Tonight, we made history," Sotheby's chairman Helena Newman declared once the hammer fell. Three of the top 20 are Klimts, which tells you where the Vienna painter's portraits stand with collectors now.

5. Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?), Paul Gauguin ($210 million, 2014)

For a couple of years this 1892 Tahiti canvas was called the most expensive painting in the world, at close to $300 million. A trial at the High Court in London later put the real figure at $210 million. The seller was Rudolf Staechelin, a retired Sotheby's executive; the buyer was a company acting for the emir of Qatar.

6. Number 17A, Jackson Pollock (about $200 million, 2015)

The other half of Griffin's $500 million purchase. This 1948 drip painting appeared in the 1949 Life magazine story that made Pollock a household name.

Seven to twelve: museums enter the bidding

7. The Standard Bearer, Rembrandt (€175 million, 2022)

Rembrandt painted this swaggering flag bearer in 1636. The French Rothschilds sold it to the Netherlands: €150 million came from the Dutch government, €15 million from the Rembrandt Association and €10 million from the Rijksmuseum Fund. It went on show in June 2023, hung beside The Night Watch.

8. Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, Andy Warhol ($195 million, 2022)

At the time, the highest price ever paid at auction for a 20th-century work. The dealer Larry Gagosian bought the 1964 silkscreen on May 9, 2022, with the hammer at $170 million, from the foundation of the Swiss collectors Thomas and Doris Ammann. The proceeds went to its work for children at risk.

9. No. 6 (Violet, Green and Red), Mark Rothko ($186 million, 2014)

Bought privately by Dmitry Rybolovlev, the same collector who later sold the Salvator Mundi. Painted in 1951.

10. Water Serpents II, Gustav Klimt ($183.8 million, 2013)

Another Rybolovlev purchase, this one through the Swiss dealer Yves Bouvier. Klimt finished it in 1907, the same year he completed the golden portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.

11. Number 7A, Jackson Pollock ($181.2 million, 2026)

The newest entry. On May 18, 2026, Christie's sold this 1948 drip canvas from the collection of S.I. Newhouse, the former Condé Nast chairman, for a $157 million hammer. It measures roughly 11 by 3 feet and is the largest Pollock drip painting still in private hands. Pollock's auction record before that night was about $61 million.

12. Portraits of Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit, Rembrandt (about $180 million, 2016)

A husband and wife painted in 1634, owned by the Rothschilds since 1877. On February 1, 2016, France and the Netherlands bought them together. France owns Oopjen, the Dutch own Maerten, and the pair may never be separated. They alternate between the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum.

Thirteen to twenty

13. Les Femmes d'Alger (Version O), Pablo Picasso ($179.4 million, 2015)

Painted in 1955 and sold at Christie's on May 11, 2015, to Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, a former prime minister of Qatar. It beat Picasso's previous auction record by $72.88 million.

14. Nu couché, Amedeo Modigliani ($170.4 million, 2015)

Sold at Christie's on November 9, 2015, to the Chinese collector Liu Yiqian, who bid by phone.

15. Masterpiece, Roy Lichtenstein ($165 million, 2017)

Agnes Gund sold this 1962 comic-strip painting to Steven A. Cohen and put $100 million of the proceeds into the Art for Justice Fund, which works on criminal justice reform. Few prices in this list did more good.

16. Nu couché (sur le côté gauche), Amedeo Modigliani ($157.2 million, 2018)

Modigliani's largest painting, about 58 inches across. Its previous owner paid $26.9 million for it in 2003. On May 14, 2018, it became the priciest painting Sotheby's had ever sold, a title it kept until the Klimt at number four.

17. Le Rêve, Pablo Picasso ($155 million, 2013)

The painting with the elbow story. In 2006 casino owner Steve Wynn had agreed to sell this 1932 portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter to Steven Cohen for $139 million, then put his elbow through the canvas. The deal died. Cohen bought it anyway in March 2013, for $16 million more.

18. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II, Gustav Klimt ($150 million, 2016)

Oprah Winfrey paid $87.9 million for this 1912 portrait in 2006 and sold it privately a decade later to an anonymous Chinese buyer. Its better-known sister, the golden Adele of 1907, went for $135 million in 2006 and now hangs at the Neue Galerie in New York, just outside this top 20.

19. Les Poseuses, Ensemble, Georges Seurat ($149.2 million, 2022)

The only Seurat in the ranking, and the only painting made of dots. It sold in 2022.

20. Three Studies of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon ($142.4 million, 2013)

Three canvases, one sitter: the painter Lucian Freud. Sold at Christie's on November 12, 2013.

Just below the line sits a famous name: a pastel version of Munch's scream sold at Sotheby's for $119.9 million in 2012. The painted version, the Scream most people picture, sits in a museum and isn't for sale.

What is the Mona Lisa worth?

Nobody knows, because it has never been sold since the king of France paid for it. Francis I acquired it in 1518, paying 2,604 livres to Leonardo's pupil Salaì for a batch of paintings, and it has stayed in the royal and then national collections ever since. It hangs in the Salle des États of the Louvre's Denon Wing.

The closest thing to a price is an insurance valuation. Before the painting traveled to Washington and New York, it was assessed at $100 million on December 14, 1962, still the highest insurance valuation for a painting. The policy was never taken out, since paying for security cost less than the premiums would have. My guess is that a real sale today would beat the Salvator Mundi by a wide margin. It won't happen. Lisa Gherardini's half-smile stays in Paris.

What the list tells you

Look at who's buying. Qatari buyers appear three times, Griffin twice, Steven Cohen twice, and Rybolovlev twice as a buyer plus once as the seller of number one. The top of the market is a small room. Look at when, too: 19 of these 20 sales happened in 2013 or later. And look at where the paintings went. The two Rembrandt deals put three canvases straight into public museums; most of the rest went into private homes where you'll rarely see them.

The other thing the list shows is how much a story adds. A near-lost Leonardo, a portrait that saved its sitter's life, a canvas with an elbow hole. The paint matters, and so does everything that happened to it afterward.

Hanging one of them at home

None of these will come up for sale at a price a person can pay, and several may never come up again. What you can have is a copy painted by hand in oil on canvas. Art & See makes them of the Card Players, the Salvator Mundi and the golden Adele, and of the other famous works people ask to have copied.

Sources

• Sotheby's, November 2025 New York results
• Sotheby's, Modigliani Nu couché sale
• NBC News, Salvator Mundi sale
• Smithsonian Magazine, Pollock's Number 7A
• The Art Newspaper, The Standard Bearer
• Musée du Louvre press, Soolmans and Coppit
• Musée du Louvre collections, Mona Lisa
• Guinness World Records, highest insurance valuation