Moments from Sotheby’s London (auction, 2007)

2007 landed at the very peak of a pre-financial-crisis art market boom, a stretch of a few extraordinary years when Sotheby's London evening sales regularly set records that seemed unthinkable just a decade earlier, driven by a wave of new money, hedge fund wealth, Russian oligarchs, Gulf collectors, entering the market in force for the first time. That boom collapsed hard the following year when the global financial crisis hit, making 2007 sales a useful historical marker in hindsight, the market's giddy high point right before a genuine reckoning.

Sotheby's has run its London evening sales from its New Bond Street headquarters, in the heart of the city's historic gallery and auction district, since long before that boom and long after its bust, and the building itself, alongside the auction house's flagship Mayfair location, is worth walking past even outside a sale, the pre-sale exhibitions here are free and open to the public and remain one of the more underused ways to see major paintings up close in London without a museum queue.