Art: How Much Would You Pay?
The love of art crosses boundaries, transcends social classes and costs nothing. Owning art, on the other hand, comes at a price. A high price. In some cases, a massively high price. You could buy houses, or indeed whole streets, for less than some people pay for a Picasso.
The record for the highest sum reached at an art auction goes to Edvard Munch’s The Scream which sold for $119.9m (£74m/ €97m) at Sotheby’s in New York, in May 2012.
Artnet, an online art dealer, recently published a list of the top ten prices paid at art auctions during the month of June this year. First on the list is John Constable’s The Lock which sold at Christie’s in London for £22.4m, followed by Rembrandt’s A man in a gorget and cap which went for £8.4m. Incidentally, all ten on the list could be bought for the price of the record-breaking Munch.
But if you couldn’t muster that much cash even if you turned out your pockets, emptied all those jars full of small change, and even threw in your beer money, don’t worry, because all of the artists in Artnet’s top ten are available in Europeana. So you can enjoy them without spending a single ban, cent, fillér, gros, haler, øre, penny, santīms or stotinka.
Here’s our free gallery of selected sketches and paintings by artists whose work has recently gone for a song…
Images, courtesy of the French National Library, Rijksmuseum and Wellcome Library, are all in the Public Domain.