Christie’s | History, Art Sales, & Facts

Christie became a friend of such artists and craftsmen as Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Thomas Chippendale, and his premises became a gathering place for collectors, dealers, and fashionable society. His knowledge of valuable art was reflected in the types of transactions he handled: when chosen in 1778 to handle the sale of Sir Robert Walpole’s collection, Christie found a buyer in Catherine the Great, the Russian empress.

James Christie the Younger assumed management of the auction house after his father’s death in 1803, becoming an expert on ancient Greek and Italian vases and sculpture. In 1823 the firm moved to 8 King’s Street, St. James’s Square (vacated only from 1941 to 1953 because of war damage), where its headquarters remained into the 21st century. After the younger Christie’s death, his two sons, James Stirling and George Henry, took in William Manson as a partner and, later, a brother, Edward Manson. When Thomas J. Woods joined in 1859, the firm took the name Christie, Manson & Woods, and in 1940 it was reorganized as a private limited company. In part to answer competition from rival auction house Sotheby’s, the firm began expanding beyond the United Kingdom by opening offices or salesrooms in Rome (1958), Geneva (1968), and Tokyo (1969). Christie’s became a public company in 1973 and was purchased by French investor François Pinault in 1998. The firm’s first Paris auction occurred in 2001, soon after the French government removed its traditional controls over auctioneering in France.

Christie’s has a tradition of handling many historic sales. Major events include auctioning the contents of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s studio (1794), selling Madame du Barry’s jewels (1795), managing the 40-day sale of the 2nd duke of Buckingham and Chandos’s Stowe House collection (1848), handling the 17-day Hamilton Palace sale of pictures (1882), selling pictures from Sir George Drummond’s collection (1919), and conducting the sale of the Ford Collection of Impressionist paintings (1980). In 2017 the firm set a record with the sale of Salvator Mundi, a painting credited to Leonardo da Vinci, which was purchased for $450.3 million, then the highest price ever paid for an artwork.

Christie’s publishes Christie’s Magazine, containing articles on collecting and news of upcoming sales. Subsidiary businesses include appraisals and valuations; a photographic archive and image bank; courses in the fine arts and decorative arts; storage for works of art; and real estate services.