Who Owns Christie's?

James Christie founded the auction house in London in 1766. His first recorded sale took place on December 5, 1766, at rooms on Pall Mall, and the business quickly became a fixture of Georgian London's art trade. Christie cultivated relationships with aristocratic sellers and negotiated major transactions, including the 1778 sale of Sir Robert Walpole's painting collection to Catherine the Great of Russia.

Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Christie's established itself as one of London's two dominant auction houses alongside Sotheby's. The firm moved to its landmark headquarters at 8 King Street in St. James's in 1823, where its flagship saleroom still operates. The twentieth century brought international expansion, with offices and salerooms opening across Europe, the Americas, and eventually Asia.

The 1990s brought the company's most serious crisis. Christie's and Sotheby's were found to have colluded on commission pricing, resulting in a price-fixing scandal that led to criminal convictions in the United States in 2000 to 2001. Christie's received conditional amnesty from US prosecution for cooperating first, but the scandal damaged both houses' reputations and triggered hundreds of millions of dollars in civil settlements.

In 1998, during this turbulent period, Francois Pinault's Artemis acquired Christie's, taking it private. Under Pinault ownership the house rebuilt and expanded, opening salerooms in Hong Kong, Paris, and Dubai, and pushing into new categories such as jewelry, handbags, wine, watches, and design.

Modern era highlights include the 2017 sale of Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi for $450 million, the highest price ever paid for a painting at auction; the $832 million David Rockefeller collection sale in 2018; the $69 million sale of Beeple's digital work Everydays in 2021, which launched the mainstream NFT market; and the $1.6 billion Paul Allen collection in 2022, the largest single-owner sale in auction history. Christie's posted a record $8.4 billion in total sales in 2022.

In 2024 the company acquired Gooding and Company, the collector car auctioneer, which now operates as Gooding Christie's and contributed $234 million to 2025 results. After softer art market years in 2023 and 2024, Christie's 2025 sales recovered to $6.2 billion, up 6 percent, with second-half sales up 26 percent year over year.