Founded in 1744, Sotheby’s is the oldest and largest internationally recognised firm of fine art auctioneers in the world. It has a global network of 80 offices and the company’s annual worldwide sales turnover is currently in excess of $7 billion.
Sotheby’s founder, Samuel Baker, was an entrepreneur, occasional publisher and successful bookseller who held his first auction under his own name on 11 March 1744. The dispersal of “several Hundred scarce and valuable Books in all branches of Polite Literature” from the library of Sir John Stanley fetched a grand total of £826.
Baker concocted enticing advertising campaigns and produced authoritative catalogues. He was, as one colleague noted, a “joyous fellow” with a fondness for plum-coloured coats.
For more than a century, Baker and his successors were to handle all of the great libraries sold at auction, including those of the Earls of Sunderland, Hopetoun and Pembroke and the Dukes of Devonshire, York and Buckingham. Following Napoleon’s death, Sotheby’s sold the books he had taken into exile to St Helena – the final lot was the Emperor’s tortoiseshell-and-gold walking stick.
In 1767 Baker went into partnership with George Leigh. Leigh was a natural auctioneer with an actor’s sense of timing. His ivory hammer is still on display at Sotheby’s London galleries. On Baker’s death in 1778, his estate was divided between Leigh and Baker’s nephew John Sotheby, whose family remained involved in the business for more than 80 years. During that time the company extended its role to take in the sale of prints, coins, medals and antiquities.
In 1842 John Wilkinson, the firm’s senior accountant, became a partner and when the last of the Sotheby family died in 1861, Wilkinson took over as head of the business. Three years later he promoted Edward Grose Hodge, and restyled the company Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge, the name it carried until 1924.
Country: United Kingdom
Year: 1744
Date: March 11
Source: https://www.sothebys.com/en/about/our-history
History of Auctioneering
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The most valuable diary in the world is a journal kept by Dr. Alexander Macklin, a surgeon on Sir Ernest Shackleton’s legendary Endurance adventure of 1914-1917, which was sold at Christie’s, London, UK on 25 September 2001 for £104,950 ($153,573).
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The highest price ever paid for a single piece of furniture is £19.045,250 ($36,662,106) at Christie’s, London, UK on 9 December 2004 for the 18th-century Italian Badminton cabinet purchased by Dr. Johan Kraeftner, Director of the Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna, Italy on behalf of Prinz Hans Adam II of Liechtenstein, to be exhibited in the museum.
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The most expensive musical instrument sold at auction is the ‘Lady Blunt’ Stradivarius violin and was sold at £9,808,000 ($15,875,800) by Tarisio Auctions (USA) in London, UK, on 20 June 2011. The auction was organised online on behalf of the Nippon Music Foundation and the proceeds went to the Northeastern Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Relief Fund.
The authenticity of the violin was certified by the firm W.E. Hill & Sons.
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The most expensive baseball jersey sold at auction was sold for $4,415,658 (£2,789,860), by SCP Auctions (USA) of Laguna Niguel, California, USA, on 20 May 2012.
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A near-complete skeleton of a dodo (Raphus cucullatus) sold for £346,300 ($404,192) with buyers’ premium at Summers Place Auctions in Billingshurst, West Sussex, UK, on 22 November 2016. It was bought by a private collector, who made the winning bid by telephone. Errol Fuller, Natural History curator at Summers Place, said that the piece was an “amazingly rare”, being the first “relatively complete” skeleton to have come up for auction since the 1920s.
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Most expensive hockey jersey sold at auction was sold for $1,275,707.91 (£860,975.26), by Classic Auctions Inc. (Canada) of Delson, Quebec, Canada, on 22 June 2010.
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The most expensive sweater or cardigan sold at auction is a grey mohair five-button cardigan once worn by Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. On 26 October 2019, the cardigan sold for $334,000 (including buyer’s premium) at a Julien’s Auctions event at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York, USA.
This stained, saggy old cardigan became an unlikely fashion icon after Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain wore it during the taping of his band’s acoustic special MTV Unplugged in November 1993.
The cardigan was made by the Manhattan Shirt Company – a mass-market apparel retailer and manufacturer – probably in the early 1960s. The fabric is a blend of acrylic, mohair and Lycra, and its original retail price was probably somewhere around $15 (equivalent to around $130 in 2019). Kurt Cobain likely bought it from a thrift store in Seattle, which was where the famously fashion-averse grunge star did most of his shopping.
During the last year or so of Cobain’s life, he reportedly wore this cardigan frequently, both in public and while at home. As a result, it is worn and damaged, with a missing button, cigarette burns and a mysterious crunchy brown stain around the right front pocket.
After Cobain’s death in 1994, his wife gave it to their daughter Frances’s nanny, Jackie Farry. Farry had intended to give it to Frances when she got older, but in 2014 she was forced to sell it to pay medical bills. When it first went up for auction, it fetched a price of $137,500 – more than double the expected value.
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The most expensive durian fruit sold at auction was 1.5 million Thai baht ($47,784; £37,635), and was achieved by Maliwan Han Chai Thai, Pa Toi Lung Mu farm and the King Of Durian festival (All Thailand) in Nonthaburi, Thailand on 7 June 2019.
The rare kanyao durian was handpicked just a day before it was sold from a nearby farm where the minimum price of the fruit is 20,000 baht.
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The most expensive pork carcass sold at auction is JPY 1,394,690 ($12,756, £9,964, €10,809) which was produced by Hitachi Farm Co., Ltd. (Japan) and sold at Tokyo Meat Market in Minato, Tokyo, Japan, on 25 August 2017.
The pork breed is Bunabuta (mixed breed of Landrace, Middle White, and Duroc) which is known for soft meat with white fat, resulting in sweet and pure taste. Hitachi Farm is located in Kuji, Ibaraki, Japan.
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