Stockholms Auktionsverk was founded in 1674, on the initiative of Baron Claes Rålamb, who was Governor of Stockholm at that time. As such, we are the oldest auction house in the world still operating today. We have sold items in styles now known as Baroque, Rococo and Gustavian while they were contemporary. Our list of distinguished customers over the centuries features names such as King Karl XI, King Gustav III, our Swedish national bard Carl Michael Bellman, and authors August Strindberg and Selma Lagerlöf.
Today, Stockholms Auktionsverk is a leading Nordic marketplace for art, crafts, and antiques from a variety of ages and epochs. Stockholms Auktionsverk has auction houses in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö and Helsingborg, as well is in Finland and Germany.
Stockholms Auktionsverk is a “stock exchange trading floor” for Swedish and international art, antiques, and design. Our business is built on confidence, knowledge, tradition, and personal contacts. Our staff are highly educated experts in a range of specialist areas, different cultures and historical periods in art, applied art and antiques. Since May 2021, Stockholms Auktionsverk is owned by Auctionet. Our network of Swedish and international customers, dealers, and collectors is large and constantly growing.
On February 27, Stockholms Auktionsverk celebrates its 350th anniversary, marking a historic milestone for the world’s oldest auction house. Founded on the initiative of Baron Claes Rålamb – governor-general of Stockholm and a pioneer in the auction world – who issued the founding auction chamber ordinance in 1674.
“Over the years, Stockholms Auktionsverk has been a staple marketplace, but also a meeting place for Stockholmers and, in recent years, for the rest of the world as well. With us, items have changed hands for 350 years; someone’s unwanted possessions become someone else’s beloved treasures. We have auctioned off some of the country’s finest art treasures, which not only represent significant monetary value but are also highly valued on a cultural-historical level. Works that manage to capture the Swedish soul, art that is an honor to be around but also constitute important work for us to preserve for future generations,” says Victoria Svederberg, head of the art department at Stockholms Auktionsverk.
For three and a half centuries, Stockholms Auktionsverk has been a focal point for extraordinary artworks and antiques – each a small part of history. When Anders Zorn’s “Omnibus” was sold to the National Museum for 1.2 million SEK in 1981, it was the most expensive Swedish painting ever auctioned. However, the most famous painting ever sold at Stockholms Auktionsverk is Rembrandt’s “Kökspigan” from 1651. During the 18th century, it was owned by Eva Bielke, but after her passing it was sold at Stockholms Auktionsverk in 1779, along with several other artworks, to a new renowned owner – King Gustav III, who received the royal privilege to choose first from the private art collection auctioned at Stockholms Auktionsverk in 1779. In 1866, “Kökspigan” was transferred to the National Museum’s collections, where it still resides.
Behind the doors at Nybrogatan 32 stands the clock that has signaled auctions at Stockholms Auktionsverk for 310 years. From 1727, the bell was used to summon the public to auctions twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. After 1858, the number of days doubled, and during the peak seasons – now referred to as the spring and fall auction seasons – auctions could take up to six days of the week. The auction chamber was state-run and operated between 1674 and 1790 from Själagårdsgatan 19 in the Old Town. In 1790, it moved to the Polus house on Myntgatan and in 1836, further to Birger Jarls torg on Riddarholmen, where it remained for over a century. In 1949, it moved to the Bonnier house on Torsgatan, ten years later to Norrtullsgatan 6, and in 1977 to Stockholm city and Beridarebansgatan in the premises under the Gallerian. In 2002, it moved to its current location at Nybrogatan 32.
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Source: https://www.auktionsverket.com/en/our-history/
History of Auctioneering
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Francis N. Werlein, age 88 of rural Mondovi, died Sunday Feb 27, 2005, at his residence. Francis attended and graduated from Lane School of Auctioneering in 1948.
Francis, Werlein did that auctioneer’s chant, or bid call – as it’s known in the industry – for more than half a century and was one of the charter members of the Wisconsin Auctioneers Association.
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Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s 1896 print Young Woman on the Beach was sold at Christie’s auction house on King Street in London, UK, on 20 March 2013, for £2.1 m ($3 m), making it the most expensive original print ever sold at auction. The sum exceeded the pre-sale estimate for the piece of £700,000 by 200%.
Young Woman on the Beach is a haunting image of a girl in a white dress, her back to the viewer, looking out across a vast ocean. It is an example of an aquatint print, a process in which the artist etches the image into a copper or zinc plate using acid. The plate is then inked and run through a printing press to transfer the image to paper. Munch created a number of prints between 1896 and 1897. He is thought to have made 11 copies of Young Woman on the Beach.
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A rare doll, manufactured by German company Kämmer & Reinhardt between 1909 and 1912, realized a sum of £242,500 ($395,750) in an auction held at Bonham’s Knightsbridge salesroom in London, UK, on 24 September 2014 – the most ever fetched by a doll at auction. The lifelike doll is a little girl with plaited auburn hair and blue-grey eyes, wearing a lace-sleeved white dress, a straw hat and white shoes and stockings. There are no other examples of this doll known – she is believed to have been an experimental design that was never put into production.
Kämmer & Reinhardt was a well-known manufacturer of “character dolls” from the late-19th century to the mid-20th century. Ernst Kämmer modelled the heads of the dolls from bisque – a hard, unglazed type of porcelain. The material has a glare-free appearance, giving the dolls a powdery, soft complexion.
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A matte white “Himalaya” crocodile skin Hermès Birkin 30 handbag sold for HKD 2,940,000 (US$ 377,238; £293,767) to an anonymous bidder at the Handbags & Accessories auction organized by Christie’s in Hong Kong on 31 May 2017. The bag, which was produced in 2014, features 176.3 g of 18-karat white gold and 10.23 carats of diamonds.
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The most expensive bicycle sold at auction is £318,000 ($500,000) and was sold at Sothebys, New York, on 1 November 2009. The one-off creation named ‘Butterfly bike’ by British artist Damien Hirst was ridden by Lance Armstrong (USA) during the final stage of Tour de France 2009. The sale was in aid of the Mr. Armstrong’s LiveStrong cancer charity. Mr. Hirst used real butterfly wings, lacquered onto the frame of a Trek Madone bike.
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The highest price ever paid for wool is A$10,300 ($7,923.23; £5,047) per kg (2lb 3 oz) on 11 January 1995, when Aoki International Co. Ltd of Yokohama, Japan bought a bale of extra superfine wool with an average fibre diameter of 13.8 microns at an auction at Geelong, Victoria, Australia.
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The most expensive painting sold at auction is Salvator Mundi by Leonardi da Vinci, which sold for $450,312,500 (£342,148,000; €381,431,000), including buyer’s premium, at an auction held by Christie’s in New York, USA, on 11 November 2017.
The painting was included in Christie’s sale of “Postwar and Contemporary Art” at Rockefeller Center in New York, in the hope that it would appeal to the biggest art collectors. The seller, Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, bought the painting in 2013 for approximately £77.3 million ($127.5 million; €92.6 million). The buyer, who bid by telephone, chose to remain anonymous. Over 1,000 art collectors, advisors, dealers and journalists were present at the auction, with thousand more tuned in via a live stream.
Some specialists believe that Leonardo originally painted the work for the French Royal family. The painting went missing from 1763 for over 150 years. Passing through the possession of several collectors over the centuries, the work was rediscovered in a small, regional auction in the United Sates in 2005. Prior to that, it was sold in 1958 at Sotheby’s for £45 ($59), having been dismissed as a copy.
Salvator Mundi (Savior of the World) was on show in an exhibition of Leonardo’s surviving paintings at the National Gallery, London, in 2011-12, confirming its acceptance as a fully autograph work by Leonardo da Vinci. However, there still remains speculation over the painting’s origins, some specialists attributing the work as one of da Vinci’s apprentices.
Nevertheless, the painting was presented as one of the greatest artistic discoveries of the 20th century.
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The CTF Pink Star, formerly known as the Steinmetz Pink and the Pink Star, an internally flawless pink 59.6–carat diamond, sold for HKD 553,037,500 ($71.2 m; £57.3 m), including buyer’s premium, at a Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong on 4 April 2017. The diamond, mined in 1999 by De Beers in Africa, was 132.5 carats in its rough state and took two years to cut and polish. Now, the oval-shaped diamond, the largest internally flawless or flawless fancy vivid pink diamond that the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) has ever graded, measures 2.69 cm by 2.06 cm (1.06 in by 0.81 in) and is mounted on a ring. The buyer was Hong Kong conglomerate Chow Tai Fook Enterprises, which has a chain of jewellery stores. They immediately renamed the diamond the CTF Pink Star in memory of the late Dr. Cheng Yu-Tung, father of the current chairman and founder of Chow Tai Fook.
On 12 November 2013, the Pink Star achieved 76,325,000 Swiss francs ($83.01 million; £52.07 million), including commission fees, when the hammer went down at Christie’s auction house in Geneva, Switzerland. However the sale did not go ahead due to default by the anonymous buyer.
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The CTF Pink Star, formerly known as the Steinmetz Pink and the Pink Star, an internally flawless pink 59.6-carat diamond, sold for HKD 553,037,500 ($71.2 m; £56.8 m), including buyer’s premium, at a Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong on 4 April 2017. The diamond, mined in 1999 by De Beers in Africa, was 132.5 carats in its rough state and took two years to cut and polish. Now, the oval-shaped diamond, the largest internally flawless or flawless fancy vivid pink diamond that the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) has ever graded, measures 2.69 cm by 2.06 cm (1.06 in by 0.81 in) and is mounted on a ring. The buyer was Hong Kong conglomerate Chow Tai Fook Enterprises, which has a chain of jewellery stores. They immediately renamed the diamond the CTF Pink Star in memory of the late Dr. Cheng Yu-Tung, father of the current chairman and founder of Chow Tai Fook.
On 12 November 2013, the Pink Star achieved 76,325,000 Swiss francs ($83.01 million; £52.07 million), including commission fees, when the hammer went down at Christie’s auction house in Geneva, Switzerland. However the sale did not go ahead due to default by the anonymous buyer.
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