London’s Auction Houses

Last month, Christie’s announced its inaugural auction of work created by AI. Called Augmented Intelligence, the auction consists of thirty-four works – including painting, digital prints, and sculpture – all demonstrating the way in which artists today incorporate and collaborate with artificial intelligence. This event seems completely disconnected to the auction that Samuel Baker held in London on the 11 March 1744, which he described as the dispersal of “several Hundred scarce and valuable Books in all branches of Polite Literature”, from the library of Sir John Stanley, a British politician.

What connects these two sales, nearly three hundred years apart, is the role of the auction house as the intermediary which brings together those who wish to sell and those who wish to buy. Baker’s book sale raised only £826, but it was the founding auction of the company he had created and which he ran for the next thirty years, specialising in the sale of book collections of famous aristocratic families. When he died, his nephew, John Sotheby took over the firm, and it has retained his family name ever since.

Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Bonhams auction houses, are all located in Mayfair, London and each firm can trace its history back to the second half of the eighteenth century. Today they conduct major sales all around the world, including in Paris, New York, Tokyo, and Shanghai, in which they sell a wide range of objects, including fine art paintings and sculpture, prints and drawings, but also antiquities, books and manuscripts, clocks, coins, fashion accessories, furniture, photographs, whisky and fine wine.

In 2017, Christie’s set a record for the highest price ever paid for a work of art, when the painting Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardi da Vinci, sold for $450.3 million. James Christie founded his auction house in 1766, initially focused on art and furniture. He was friends with Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, two of the leading English painters for the day, and of Thomas Chippendale the famous furniture maker and craftsman. In 1778, when the large and important art collection of Sir Robert Walpole, the former British Prime Minister, was consigned for sale in 1778, Christie sold it to the Russian Empress, Catherine the Great.

Phillips auction house was founded in 1796 by Harry Phillips, a former associate of James Christie, and included Napoleon as one of its famous early clients. Twenty years ago, Phillips merged with Bonhams, which had been established in 1793 by Walter Bonham, a book specialist, and Thomas Dodd, an expert in art prints. Over the next fifty years, they expanded their range of sale items to include jewellery, porcelain, furniture, armour, and wine.

Bonhams and Sotheby’s are both located on New Bond Street, while Christie’s is a few minutes’ walk away on King Street. Visitors can wander through the galleries looking at art works or other objects that are soon to be sold at auction. Most works have a detailed description, including the provenance of the work, and a guide price that gives some sense of how much the work will sell for. Whether you have £826 to spend on books, or $450 million to spend on a Leonardo, if you want to buy the Mayfair auction houses will be very happy to see you.

Ana Teles for London Art Walk
March 2025