Moments from Sotheby’s Auction (2017)

Founded in London in 1744, more than two decades before its great rival Christie's, Sotheby's has spent nearly three centuries building the same essential business, connecting collectors willing to sell with buyers willing to pay record sums, and by the mid-2010s it was running major evening sales in New York, London, and Hong Kong that regularly rewrote the record books for individual artists. 2017 was part of a genuinely strong run for the house, with major Impressionist, modern, and contemporary evening sales pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars across a single season and setting fresh individual artist records along the way.

As with Christie's, the pre-sale viewing exhibitions are free and open to the public regardless of whether you have any intention of bidding, and they remain one of the more underused ways to see major paintings up close outside a museum context, unframed by curatorial wall text and, for a brief window before the hammer falls, still technically available to the highest bidder in the room. Check Sotheby's public calendar for upcoming viewings in whichever city you're near, they run considerably more often than the headline-grabbing evening sales themselves.