What is the standing of London as an artwork buying and selling location? | EUROtoday

Things have been trying up lately within the worldwide artwork market. However, the London location fell additional behind New York final yr. At Sotheby’s, this was not least because of the truth that the corporate concentrated its acquisitions on the big New York November auctions, with which the brand new headquarters within the Breuer constructing have been purported to be grandly inaugurated.

The most costly lot in London in 2025 was Christie’s: Canaletto’s oil portray “Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day”. Acquired by British Prime Minister Robert Walpole within the 1730s, it set a brand new document for the Italian veduta painter when it bought for £27.5 million at Christie’s in July. The estimate was “more than” 20 million. The second most costly artwork object auctioned in London was simply as useful: a Fabergé egg manufactured from rock crystal with diamonds made for the mom of the final Russian tsar. “The Winter Egg,” designed by Alma Theresia Pihl in St. Petersburg in 1913, achieved a document hammer worth of £19.5 million in December. The outdated document for Fabergé was set in 2007 with a gross gross of 8.9 million kilos by an egg owned by Rothschild.

In December, Christie’s additionally reported a world document for an Old Master print. Rembrandt’s “Arnout Tholinx, Inspector” was auctioned by the corporate simply over 100 years in the past – for a then sensational 3,780 kilos to the sellers Colnaghi. This time a collector provided 2.5 million. The most costly London modern lot went underneath the hammer at Christie’s in October. The Canadian collector François Odermatt secured Peter Doig’s “Ski Jacket” (estimated at six to eight million kilos) from the gathering of the Danish entrepreneur Ole Faarup for twelve million kilos.

Overall, the public sale home Christie’s, which has been headed by the American Bonnie Brennan as CEO since February, generated $4.7 billion in public sale gross sales worldwide in 2025 – a rise of eight p.c in comparison with 2024. Auctions within the USA contributed $2.6 billion, 15 p.c greater than within the earlier yr. Auction gross sales in Europe and the Middle East mixed elevated by simply two p.c. At Christie’s in London, 832 million have been bought in greenback phrases, and in Paris 377 million. For comparability: In 2024, London contributed $787 million to international public sale gross sales at Christie’s, Paris contributed $415 million. Christie’s additionally introduced that its three most costly artworks in 2015 have been bought privately, i.e. with out the general public.

Sotheby’s didn’t launch separate gross sales figures for London. The firm didn’t promote any of its ten most costly public sale heaps within the British capital in 2025. The most costly London lot was Francis Bacon’s portray “Portrait of a Dwarf” (6/9 million) on the hammer worth of 11 million kilos. Converted into {dollars}, it’s ranked fifteenth in Sotheby’s international rankings. Old Masters additionally did effectively at Sotheby’s: within the “Old Masters” week in December, the home bought 43 million kilos, the second greatest outcome for the corporate in London since 2019.

The non-public assortment of the yr was “Pauline Karpidas: The London Collection” at Sotheby’s in September. Around 12,000 guests got here to the immersive summer season exhibition. The public sale grossed greater than another non-public assortment at Sotheby’s in Europe: 101 million kilos, twice the decrease estimate. All 345 heaps have been bought. Karpidas additionally contributed the second most costly lot of the yr auctioned at Sotheby’s in London: René Magritte’s “La Statue volante” (9/12 million) for the hammer worth of 8.4 million kilos.

The Russian-owned Phillips public sale home had to deal with the departure of Global Chairwoman Cheyenne Westphal, who works from London, in 2025. Worldwide, Phillips had gross sales of $927 million, a rise of ten p.c. The firm now sells 70 p.c of all objects on-line. A brand new price construction that rewards early bidders elevated the variety of corresponding bids and made flooring auctions extra predictable. The most costly lot of the yr at Phillips was not a murals, however a wristwatch: a Patek Philippe from 1943, which bought for the equal of $17.6 million in Geneva. In London, three of the ten most costly artworks have been works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, led by “MP”, painted in 1984, with a hammer worth of 4 million kilos. It is Phillips’ sixth most costly lot on the planet.

At Bonhams in London, a portray by the Japanese Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, who made a reputation for himself in Paris within the Nineteen Twenties, grew to become the highest lot of the yr. Foujita’s depictions of cats and canine are significantly sought-after, as in “Chiens savants, ou le carnaval des chiens” (1.5/2 million), which was auctioned in October for £3.98 million with premium.

London can also be establishing itself as a spot to promote artwork from Southeast Asia, whether or not created there or within the diaspora. The “Crossing Borders” exhibition at Phillips featured fashionable works from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. At Sotheby’s, all heaps within the Modern & Contemporary South Asian Art public sale bought and fetched £18.9 million, 5 occasions the expectation and the division’s greatest outcome thus far. Among the data was the hammer worth of £4.6 million for Francis Newton Souza’s London Houses in Hampstead (800,000/1.2 million) from 1962. At Christie’s, the fifth most costly London lot was a Basawan, an outline of a household of cheetahs attributed to one of many main Indian painters on the Mughal courtroom within the sixteenth century: estimated at as much as one million kilos, it rose 8.5 million.

Some billionaires have left Britain due to the Labor authorities’s new overseas earnings and good points tax regime launched in 2025, however their numbers stay inside the slender limits predicted by the federal government. They are being changed by rich US residents who’re turning their backs on Trump’s America, just like the latest actor couple Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes. However, neither of them are referred to as artwork collectors.