Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that can help answer the question.
Query: What is the highest price ever paid for a Rembrandt painting at auction?
This is a list of the highest known prices paid for paintings. The current record price is approximately $450 million paid for Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi in November 2017.[1][2]
The painting was shipped to Sotheby's in New York City, where it was confirmed to be in excellent condition, needing only cleaning with soap and water, removal of varnish, and adjustments to the stretchers. The importance of the painting drew more sellers to Sotheby's planned auction, hoping to capitalize on the increasing interest in the semi-annual event. On October 25, 1979, eight to ten bidders participated in the auction of "The Icebergs", which lasted almost four minutes. Two telephone bidders remained at the $2 million mark, with the winning bid coming at $2.5 million. Not only was the amount the most ever paid at auction for an American painting—which had been set the year before, at $980,000 for George Caleb Bingham's "—"but it was the third-highest amount paid for any painting at auction. "The Icebergs"' record for an American painting stood until 1985, when Rembrandt Peale's "Rubens Peale with a Geranium" sold for $3.7 million. The anonymous buyers of "The Icebergs" put it on long-term loan with the Dallas Museum of Art, and soon donated it outright. The buyers were identified in 2010 as businessman Lamar Hunt and his wife Norma, who had been equivocal on the subject in 1979, although contemporary reporting was quite certain. According to a 1980 magazine piece, Mair Baulch did not receive any of the sale proceeds to improve her facility, although Harvey, writing in 2002, noted that the council "eventually" purchased the property that Baulch was interested in.
During the French occupation after 1794 the guilds were disbanded and the collection was dispersed. In 1821 the cup was sold for 166 guilders and it came into the hands of a collection in Scotland. It came up for auction in 1976 and the Rijksmuseum purchased it for 700,000 guilders with support from the Vereniging Rembrandt. At the time, it was the highest price ever paid for a piece of silver in the Netherlands. The reason had to do with the number of times the ewer was featured in prominent paintings of the 17th century. A selection of these are:
The second painting, done at the height of Gainsborough's fame, was sold to the Prince of Wales, later to become King George IV. It later became part of the collection of American steel magnate Elbert Henry Gary. Upon Gary's death in 1927 his collection was auctioned off, and "The Harvest Wagon" was one of the most sought-after works. After a competitive auction it was purchased by art dealer Joseph Duveen for $360,000, then the highest price ever paid at auction for a painting in the United States. Duveen later sold it to Canadian art collector Frank P. Wood for $450,000, and Wood then donated it to the Art Gallery of Ontario. In 1959 the painting was somewhat damaged during an attempted robbery when the thieves tried to cut the painting out of its frame.
Following the end of the Soviet Union and the rise of the oligarchs, Russian collectors sought to repatriate many of Fabergé's works, and auction prices reached record highs. On 27 November 2007, the Rothschild Fabergé Egg was auctioned at Christie's in London for £8.98 million. The Rothschild Fabergé egg became the record price for a piece of Fabergé, as well as the highest price ever paid for a Russian object and the most expensive price for a timepiece.
The American art magazine "Art & Antiques" named Cherry in 1985 among the 100 most important art collectors of the United States. The reputation of this collection was not only because of the quality of the works, but also for the sometimes very high prices that he paid for these pictures and scored from subsequent sales. A record-breaking example of these works was Pablo Picasso's self-portrait "Yo, Picasso". Cherry purchased the picture in 1981 at Sotheby's for $5.3 million. At the time the highest amount ever paid for a Picasso painting. The same painting was sold by Cherry in May 1989 again at Sotheby's and received from the highest bidder, the Greek shipowner Stavros Niarchos, $47.9 million—again the highest price for a work of Picasso and also the second highest ever paid for a work of art at that time.
David Feldman (born 1947 in Dublin) BA, BBS, RDP(I) is a professional philatelist, auctioneer and author. He held his first stamp auction in 1967. Feldman is Honorary Chairman of David Feldman SA, a Geneva-based auction company, through which he attained record prices for some of the world's most famous postage stamps. In 1993, Feldman auctioned the "Bordeaux Cover", which comprised the 1847 1d Orange-red and the 2d Deep Blue Mauritius "Post Office" stamps, which brought 6,175,000 Swiss francs including all commissions, at that time the highest price ever paid for any philatelic item. He also sold the unique 1855 Sweden Treskilling Yellow stamp at auction in 1996, which at the time was the highest price ever paid for a single stamp, eclipsed in 2014 by the sale of the British Guiana 1c magenta.
Christie's is a British auction house. It was founded in 1766 by James Christie. Its main premises are on King Street, St James's, in London and in the Rockefeller Center in New York City. The company is owned by Groupe Artémis, the holding company of François-Henri Pinault. Sales in 2015 totalled £4.8 billion (US$7.4 billion). In 2017 the "Salvator Mundi" was sold for $450.3 million at Christie's, and which at that time was the highest price ever paid for a single painting at an auction.
Put Down Your Whip () is a 1939 oil painting by Chinese Realism painter Xu Beihong. Completed during Xu's stay in Singapore, the painting was exhibited numerous times before its disappearance from public view in 1954. It re-emerged in 2007 and was sold for HK$72 million (US$9.2 million) in an auction on 7 April 2007 in Hong Kong, then setting a record for the highest price ever paid for a Chinese painting at an auction.
In 1987, Bond purchased Vincent van Gogh's renowned painting, "Irises," for $54 million—the highest price ever paid for a single painting. However, the purchase was funded by a substantial loan from the auctioneer, Sotheby's, which Bond failed to repay. The transaction was criticised by art dealers as possibly a manipulated sale designed to artificially inflate values generally (which it seems to have done). The painting was subsequently re-sold in 1990 to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
† Denotes paintings which are recent recordholders for the highest price paid for a painting at an auction: see list of most expensive paintings.
On 10 May 1999, Cézanne's painting "Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier" sold for $60.5 million, the fourth-highest price paid for a painting up to that time. As of 2006, it was the most expensive still life ever sold at an auction. One of Cézanne's "The Card Players" was sold in 2011 to the Royal Family of Qatar for a price variously estimated at between $250 million ($ million today) and possibly as high as $300 million ($ million today), either price signifying a new mark for highest price for a painting; surpassed only by Leonardo da Vinci's "Salvator Mundi" in November 2017.
The painting was rediscovered in December 2009 after being off public display for around forty years. It was purchased by Steve Wynn at Christie's in December 2009 for £20 million, the highest price ever paid for a painting by Rembrandt. In 2011 it was purchased by Isabel and Alfred Bader. They offered it for sale at the 2011 TEFAF art show in Maastricht for 47 million euros. The Baders donated the painting to the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in December 2015.
In 2016, Knifer's painting "PLS 69" (1969) was sold in an auction in Vienna for €137,000, which was at the time the highest price ever paid for a work of Croatian modern art.
In the early 21st century, her paintings have sold at auction for ever increasing prices. Two of her paintings have sold for more than $16,000. The highest auction price so far is $22,200.00 for lot 196 "A Family Outing". The painting was sold at a Bonham's auction in Toronto on November 30, 2009. Another painting, "A View of Sandy Cove", sold in 2012 for $20,400. A painting found in 2016 at an Ontario thrift store, "Portrait of Eddie Barnes and Ed Murphy, Lobster Fishermen", sold at auction for almost three times its estimated price. The online auction ended May 19, 2017, and the painting, which was appraised at $16,000, sold for $45,000.
The then highest price ever paid for an artwork at auction was $142.4 million for a 1969 triptych, "Three Studies of Lucian Freud", by Francis Bacon in November 2012. The record was broken in May 2015 by $179.4 million for Pablo Picasso's 1955 painting "Les Femmes d’Alger".
Thomson is an active acquirer of Canadian art. In 2007, Thomson paid $1.8 million for a face mask, the highest price ever paid for a single piece of Native North American art. An in November, 2016 he paid a record C$11.2 million to buy a painting at auction by Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris entitled "Mountain Forms". 
During 2005 and 2006, "Dora Maar au Chat", then owned by the Gidwitz family of Chicago, was shown worldwide as part of Sotheby's exhibitions in London, Hong Kong and New York. It came up for sale in an auction of Impressionist/Modern works held at Sotheby's on May 3, 2006 in New York and making it the second-highest price ever paid for a painting at auction. An anonymous Russian  bidder present at the New York auction won the work with a final bid of US$95,216,000, well exceeding the pre-auction US$50 million estimates. 
In 1980 the Whitney Museum of American Art paid $1 million for "Three Flags" (1958), then the highest price ever paid for the work of a living artist. In 1988, Johns' "False Start" was sold at auction at Sotheby's to Samuel I. Newhouse, Jr. for $17.05 million, setting a record at the time as the highest price paid for a work by a living artist at auction, and the second highest price paid for an artwork at auction in the U.S. In 2006, private collectors Anne and Kenneth Griffin (founder of the Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel LLC) bought "False Start" (1959) from David Geffen for $80 million, making it the most expensive painting by a living artist. On November 11, 2014, a 1983 version of "Flag" was auctioned at Sotheby's in New York for $36 million, establishing a new auction record for Johns.
On December 10, 2015, RM Sotheby's sold the one driven by Juan Manuel Fangio in the 1956 Mille Miglia at auction for $25,050,000 — the highest price for a car sold in 2015; the highest price ever paid for a racing car and the third most expensive ever.
In February 2006, a print of Steichen's early pictorialist photograph, "The Pond—Moonlight" (1904), sold for what was then the highest price ever paid for a photograph at auction, U.S. $2.9 million. (See List of most expensive photographs).
"Version O" was auctioned at Christie's New York for a second time in May 2015, and was expected to set a world record price for a work of art at auction. A pre-sale valuation of $140 million was placed by Christie's on the painting, one of the highest ever placed on an auctioned artwork. The most expensive work of art to previously sell at auction, Francis Bacon's's painting "Three Studies of Lucian Freud", had sold for $142.4 million against a pre-sale estimate of c.$85 million in 2013. An undisclosed reserve price had also been placed on the painting prior to the sale. The painting was sold for $179.4 million including fees, a record price for a painting at auction. It was bought by the former Qatari prime minister, Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani.
The highest price ever paid for an artwork at auction was Pablo Picasso's "Les Femmes d'Alger (Version O)" (Women of Algiers) that was sold by Christie's in May 2015 for $179.4 million.
A Dutch auction allows shares of an initial public offering to be allocated based only on price aggressiveness, with all successful bidders paying the same price per share. One version of the Dutch auction is OpenIPO, which is based on an auction system designed by Nobel Memorial Prize-winning economist William Vickrey. This auction method ranks bids from highest to lowest, then accepts the highest bids that allow all shares to be sold, with all winning bidders paying the same price. It is similar to the model used to auction Treasury bills, notes, and bonds since the 1990s. Before this, Treasury bills were auctioned through a discriminatory or pay-what-you-bid auction, in which the various winning bidders each paid the price (or yield) they bid, and thus the various winning bidders did not all pay the same price. Both discriminatory and uniform price or "Dutch" auctions have been used for IPOs in many countries, although only uniform price auctions have been used so far in the US. Large IPO auctions include Japan Tobacco, Singapore Telecom, BAA Plc and Google (ordered by size of proceeds).
In 2010, a painting of Bylot Island titled "Bylot Island I" by Lawren Harris, one of the Group of Seven mid-century Canadian artists, was sold at auction for $2.8 million, one of the highest prices ever paid for a work by a Canadian artist.