THE FIRST ARTISTS
Marks in ochre, carved figures and painted caves: people were making art tens of thousands of years before writing.
c. 73,000 years ago: The oldest drawing
A flake of stone from Blombos Cave in South Africa carries criss-cross lines drawn in red ochre: the oldest drawing yet found.
c. 51,200 years ago: The oldest painted story
In a limestone cave on Sulawesi, Indonesia, a painted pig with three human-like figures has been dated to at least 51,200 years ago: the oldest known figurative cave art.
c. 40,000 years ago: The Lion Man
A figure with a lion’s head and a human body, carved from mammoth ivory, was found in the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in Germany: one of the oldest sculptures in the world.
c. 36,000 years ago: The Chauvet cave
Lions, rhinos and horses painted in charcoal in the Chauvet cave in southern France, some of the oldest and finest cave paintings known.
c. 17,000 years ago: Lascaux
Hundreds of painted animals cover the walls of the Lascaux cave in south-west France. Teenagers found it in 1940; it closed to visitors in 1963 to protect the paintings, and people now see exact replicas.
EGYPT, GREECE AND ROME
Art for gods and kings, then for citizens and collectors: Rome pays fortunes for Greek masterpieces and copies them by the thousand.
c. 1345 BC: The bust of Nefertiti
The sculptor Thutmose’s painted bust of Queen Nefertiti was found by a German expedition at Amarna in 1912 and has been in Berlin since; Egypt has long asked for its return.
438 BC: The Parthenon
Athens dedicates the Parthenon, its marble sculptures made under the direction of Phidias: the high point of classical Greek art, copied for 2,500 years.
AD 77: Pliny on prices
Pliny the Elder’s Natural History records Roman collectors paying fortunes for Greek paintings and sculpture, and the copies made to meet demand: the first written account of an art market.
AD 79: Pompeii buried
Vesuvius buries Pompeii, preserving its wall paintings. Excavations from 1748 thrill Europe and fuel a fashion for the antique.
FAITH AND GOLD
Monasteries, cathedrals and icons: art in the service of the Church, painted on gold and paid for by the faithful.
c. 800: The Book of Kells
Monks in Ireland or Scotland create the Book of Kells, the most famous illuminated manuscript, now at Trinity College Dublin.
1261: Icons on gold
After Byzantium retakes Constantinople, artists make the great Deesis mosaic in Hagia Sophia: holy figures set against shimmering gold.
c. 1305: Giotto’s chapel
Giotto paints the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua for a banker’s son. His figures have weight and feeling: the first step from the flat icon towards the Renaissance.
THE RENAISSANCE
Bankers and popes as patrons, perspective and oil paint, and the artist becomes a celebrated individual.
1432: The Ghent Altarpiece
Jan van Eyck completes the Ghent Altarpiece, begun by his brother Hubert, with a mastery of oil paint never seen before. It has been stolen, looted or removed many times; one panel taken in 1934 has never been found.
1434: The Medici
Cosimo de’ Medici returns from exile to lead Florence. The family’s banking fortune pays for Brunelleschi, Donatello, Botticelli and Michelangelo.
1495–98: The Last Supper
Leonardo da Vinci paints The Last Supper on a refectory wall in Milan, experimenting with a technique that began flaking within his lifetime.
1498: Dürer sells prints
Albrecht Dürer publishes his Apocalypse woodcuts and sells his prints across Europe through agents: one of the first artists to grow rich from multiples.
1503: The Mona Lisa begun
Leonardo begins a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, a Florentine merchant’s wife. He keeps working on it for years; it passes to the French royal collection and later the Louvre.
1508–1512: The Sistine Chapel ceiling
Michelangelo paints the Sistine Chapel ceiling for Pope Julius II, at the same time as Raphael is decorating the Pope’s rooms nearby.
1540: The first art market hall
In Antwerp, Europe’s richest trading city, a gallery for selling paintings opens beside the cathedral: one of the first places built for the art trade.
1550: The first art history
Giorgio Vasari publishes the Lives of the Artists, the first history of art built around the biographies of famous painters, sculptors and architects.
THE FIRST ART MARKET
Amsterdam’s merchants buy paintings by the million, a king’s collection is sold off, and the London auction houses open.
1600: Caravaggio shocks Rome
Caravaggio’s paintings for the Contarelli Chapel in Rome are unveiled: real people, dramatic light, deep shadow. A violent life ends with his death at 38 in 1610.
c. 1640: Amsterdam buys pictures
In the Dutch Republic, merchants, bakers and shopkeepers buy landscapes, still lifes and portraits. Millions of paintings are made for an open market, sold by dealers, at fairs and at auction.
1642: The Night Watch
Rembrandt finishes his huge group portrait of an Amsterdam militia company, now the Rijksmuseum’s most famous painting.
1649: A king’s collection sold
After the execution of Charles I, Parliament sells his great collection of paintings, including Titians and Raphaels. Buyers include Philip IV of Spain and Cardinal Mazarin; some works are later recovered.
1656: Rembrandt goes bankrupt
Rembrandt, who had spent heavily on his house and his own collection, is declared insolvent; his possessions are sold at auction.
c. 1665: Girl with a Pearl Earring
Johannes Vermeer paints the Girl with a Pearl Earring. He dies in debt in 1675 and is almost forgotten until a French critic champions him in the 1860s.
c. 1740: The Grand Tour
Young British aristocrats tour Italy and bring home antiquities, Old Masters and Canaletto’s views of Venice, sold through agents such as Consul Joseph Smith. Many country-house collections start here.
1744: Sotheby’s first sale
The London bookseller Samuel Baker holds an auction of a gentleman’s library, the beginning of the house later known as Sotheby’s.
ACADEMIES, SALONS AND PLUNDER
Royal academies set the taste, the Louvre opens to the people, armies carry off masterpieces and national galleries are born.
1766: Christie’s first sale
James Christie holds his first auction in Pall Mall, London. Within decades he is selling Old Masters and whole collections.
1768: The Royal Academy
George III founds the Royal Academy of Arts, with Joshua Reynolds as its first president. Its Summer Exhibition has been held every year since 1769.
1793: The Louvre opens
Revolutionary France opens the royal collection to the public in the Louvre: art as the property of the nation, a model copied worldwide.
1797: Napoleon’s plunder
Under the Treaty of Tolentino, the Pope hands masterpieces to Napoleon’s France, and convoys of Italian art reach Paris. After 1815 many works are returned.
1801–1812: The Elgin Marbles
Lord Elgin removes many of the Parthenon’s sculptures. Parliament buys them in 1816 for the British Museum, and Greece has asked for their return ever since.
1824: The National Gallery
Parliament buys 38 paintings from the banker John Julius Angerstein to found the National Gallery in London.
1839: Photography arrives
Louis Daguerre’s process is announced in Paris. Painting no longer has to record the world exactly, and artists begin to look for something else.
1863: The Salon des Refusés
So many works are rejected by the official Paris Salon that Napoleon III allows an exhibition of the rejects. Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe causes a scandal.
THE MODERN REVOLUTION
Dealers back the rebels, the Impressionists win, modern art becomes an investment, and war brings the greatest looting in history.
1874: The first Impressionist exhibition
Monet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, Morisot and others show their work on their own in Paris. A critic mocks Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, and the name sticks.
1886: The dealer who made a market
Paul Durand-Ruel, who backed the Impressionists when no one else would, takes them to New York and finds his richest buyers in America.
1890: Van Gogh dies
Vincent van Gogh dies at 37, having sold very little in his lifetime. His sister-in-law Jo van Gogh-Bonger spends years promoting his work and building his reputation.
1911: The Mona Lisa stolen
Vincenzo Peruggia, who had worked at the Louvre, walks out with the Mona Lisa. It is recovered in Florence in 1913, and the theft makes it the most famous painting in the world.
1913: The Armory Show
New York’s International Exhibition of Modern Art shows Duchamp, Matisse and Picasso to America. The press is scandalised; a generation of American collectors is born.
1914: Modern art as an investment
A Paris investment club called the Peau de l’Ours auctions the Picassos and Matisses it bought cheaply ten years earlier, at a large profit, and shares some of the gain with the artists.
1917: Duchamp’s Fountain
Marcel Duchamp submits a urinal signed R. Mutt to an exhibition in New York. It is refused, and becomes one of the most influential works of the century: art can be an idea.
1920: The artist’s resale right
France gives artists and their heirs a share of the price when their work is resold, the droit de suite. Britain adopts a version in 2006.
1929: MoMA opens
The Museum of Modern Art opens in New York in November 1929, days after the Wall Street Crash, founded by three collectors including Abby Aldrich Rockefeller.
1937: “Degenerate Art”
The Nazis seize thousands of modern works from German museums and mock them in a touring exhibition in Munich. Some are sold abroad at a Lucerne auction in 1939 to raise foreign currency.
1945: The Monuments Men
Allied specialists find thousands of looted works hidden in salt mines and castles, including the Altaussee mine in Austria, and begin returning them.
NEW YORK TAKES OVER
Abstract Expressionism and Pop make New York the capital of art; evening auctions turn sales into theatre.
1949: Is he the greatest?
Life magazine asks whether Jackson Pollock is the greatest living painter in America. Abstract Expressionism makes New York the new capital of the art world.
1958: The Goldschmidt sale
Seven Impressionist paintings sell for £781,000 at a black-tie evening auction in London: the first modern auction as a social event and a headline.
1961: The first $1 million painting at auction
The Metropolitan Museum of Art buys Rembrandt’s Aristotle with a Bust of Homer at auction in New York for $2.3 million, the first painting to sell for over $1 million at auction.
1962: Soup cans
Andy Warhol shows 32 paintings of Campbell’s soup cans in Los Angeles. Pop Art turns brands and celebrities into art.
1970: The UNESCO Convention
UNESCO adopts a convention against the illicit trade in cultural property. Antiquities without a documented history from before 1970 are now treated with great caution.
1973: The Scull sale
Taxi magnate Robert Scull sells his Pop and Abstract Expressionist collection at auction in New York at huge profits. Contemporary art becomes an investment story.
1975: The buyer’s premium
Christie’s and Sotheby’s in London begin charging buyers a 10% premium on top of the hammer price, as well as charging sellers. Premiums have risen since and now take a large share of each sale.
BOOM, BUST AND THE WORLD
Japan’s bubble and crash, the Young British Artists, art fairs everywhere and the arrival of collectors from Asia and the Gulf.
1987: Sunflowers for £24.75 million
A Japanese insurer, Yasuda Fire & Marine, buys a Van Gogh Sunflowers in London for £24.75 million, triple the previous record. Japanese buying lifts the whole market.
1987: Irises and a loan
Van Gogh’s Irises sells for $53.9 million to the businessman Alan Bond, who had borrowed part of the price from the auction house. He could not pay, and the Getty Museum bought it in 1990.
1988: Freeze
Damien Hirst organises Freeze, an exhibition of student work in a London Docklands warehouse. With backing from Charles Saatchi, the Young British Artists are born.
1990: The bubble bursts
Ryoei Saito pays $82.5 million for Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr Gachet. Within months Japan’s economy turns and art prices fall for years.
1990: The Gardner Museum theft
Two men dressed as police officers steal 13 works, including a Vermeer and three Rembrandts, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. None has been recovered; the empty frames still hang.
2000: Tate Modern
Tate Modern opens in a former power station on London’s Bankside and quickly becomes one of the most visited museums of modern art in the world.
2002: Art Basel comes to Miami
The Swiss art fair opens in Miami Beach. Fairs multiply around the world and become the main place many dealers sell.
2006: Resale right in Britain
The UK introduces the artist’s resale right for living artists, extended to artists’ heirs in 2012.
2008: Hirst skips the dealers
Damien Hirst sells new work directly at auction in London for about £111 million over two days, as Lehman Brothers collapses.
2011: China’s auction boom
Chinese auction houses sell record totals as new wealth floods into art; a Qi Baishi painting makes a record price in Beijing. China becomes one of the three biggest art markets.
2013: Art Basel in Hong Kong
The leading fair opens in Hong Kong, confirming Asia as the third pole of the art market alongside New York and London.
TROPHIES, TOKENS AND HEISTS
A $450 million painting, digital tokens, billion-dollar estate sales, new money-laundering rules and a crown-jewel heist at the Louvre.
2017: Salvator Mundi: $450 million
A painting of Christ attributed to Leonardo da Vinci sells in New York for $450.3 million, the highest price ever paid for a work of art. Its attribution is still debated and it has not been shown in public since.
2017: The Louvre Abu Dhabi
A museum carrying the Louvre’s name opens in Abu Dhabi under a long agreement with France. Gulf states become major institutional buyers.
2020: Money-laundering rules for art
From January 2020, UK and EU art businesses must check who their clients are on deals worth €10,000 or more, and UK art market participants must register with HMRC.
2020: The pandemic goes online
With salerooms and fairs closed, the auction houses hold livestreamed sales and online sales jump. Many buyers try buying art online for the first time.
2021: A $69 million NFT
A digital collage by the artist Beeple, sold as a non-fungible token, makes $69.3 million in an online auction, bringing crypto money into the art market for a time.
2022: A $1.6 billion collection
The collection of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen sells in New York for about $1.6 billion, the largest single-owner sale ever, with five works over $100 million.
2022: Benin Bronzes go home
Germany hands Benin Bronzes back to Nigeria, part of a wave of museums returning objects taken in colonial wars.
2025: A Klimt for $236 million
Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer sells in New York for about $236 million, one of the highest prices ever paid at auction.
2025: The Louvre jewel heist
In October 2025 thieves use a lift on a truck to reach the Louvre’s Apollo Gallery and escape in minutes with crown jewels valued at about €88 million.