Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: What is the highest price ever paid for a Rembrandt painting at auction?
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.
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:
"Put Down Your Whip" was sold on 7 April 2007 in an auction in Hong Kong by Sotheby's for HK$72 million (US$9.2 million), setting a record for the highest price ever paid for a Chinese painting at an auction. The painting was bought by an anonymous collector over the telephone after competition from at least four other bidders.
The painting is thought to be a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, and is in oil on a white Lombardy poplar panel. It had been believed to have been painted between 1503 and 1506; however, Leonardo may have continued working on it as late as 1517. Recent academic work suggests that it would not have been started before 1513. It was acquired by King Francis I of France and is now the property of the French Republic, on permanent display at the Louvre Museum in Paris since 1797.
Knobelsdorff was an enthusiastic collector of art, a fact unknown until the recent discovery of old inventory lists. He bequeathed to his friend, Lieutenant Colonel von Keith, an extensive collection of paintings and engravings virtually unmatched in 18th century Berlin. The trustees of his estate counted and appraised 368 paintings valued at ca. 5400 "Reichstaler" and over 100 engravings worth 400 "Reichstaler". It is not clear how Knobelsdorff could have purchased such a considerable collection. There was no regular art market at that time in Berlin; at most, there were individual sales or legacy auctions which sometimes also included works of art. Probably contacts with Amsterdam and Rotterdam, centers of a thriving Dutch art market, were of use. The focus of his art collection was on landscape painting, especially Dutch paintings from the second half of the 17th century. Portraits were another important part of the collection, and there were also some scenes of battles, reflecting the taste of the times. Contemporary painters were hardly represented, and there were 37 specimens of Knobelsdorff's own work. Soon after his death the collection was dispersed and sold.
Vincent Willem van Gogh (; 30 March 185329 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterised by bold colours and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. However, he was not commercially successful and his suicide at 37 followed years of mental illness and poverty.
In a test in 2009, the British violinist Matthew Trusler played his 1711 Stradivarius, said to be worth two million U.S. dollars, and four modern violins made by the Swiss violin-maker . One of Rhonheimer's violins, made with wood that the Empa (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology) researcher Francis Schwarze had treated with fungi, received 90 of the 180 votes for the best tone, while the Stradivarius came second with 39 votes. The majority (113) of the listeners misidentified the winning violin as the Stradivarius.
The room Is dedicated to two important masterpieces of the Medici era recently restored: the imposing frieze that adorned the façade of the Villa and was commissioned by Lorenzo himself, and the precious tapestry of the Hunting Swan, one of 36 tapestries designed by Giorgio Vasari on commission of Cosimo I, especially for the Villa. Finally, though temporarily, the room is embellished with the 17th century painting of a beautiful family tree of the Medici family.
The Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice, is an oil painting on canvas by the Venetian painter Canaletto. It is a Rococo landscape painting measuring currently held as part of the Robert Lee Blaffer Memorial Collection in the Audrey Jones Beck Building at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in Houston, Texas. It was a gift from Sarah Campbell Blaffer.
A variant of the painting with a larger church tower and an additional building is used as the Venetian screen in the 2001 video game "Merchant Prince II".
The Winston Blue is the name given to what was the largest flawless vivid blue diamond bought by Harry Winston, Inc. (a wholly owned subsidiary of The Swatch Group from January 2013) on May 15, 2014, from an anonymous person for $23.8 million at Christie's Geneva Magnificent Jewels sale. The approximately $1.8003 million per carat price paid for the 13.22-carat diamond is a world record for a blue diamond. Harry Winston, Inc. had also bought a 101.73-carat colorless diamond named Winston Legacy at Christie's Geneva jewelry auction in 2013. The American luxury jeweler had then paid $26.7 million for the colorless diamond ($254,400 per carat), which is a world record for the highest price paid per carat for a colorless diamond.
For the upcoming 800th anniversary of the House of Wettin in 1889, another stucco version of a large-scale mural was commissioned. It was painted by the artist Wilhelm Walther between 1871 and 1876. Since the picture rapidly deteriorated, it was replaced with about 23,000 Meissen porcelain tiles between 1904 and 1907. The mural depicts the 35 Saxon margraves, electors, dukes and kings from Conrad, Margrave of Meissen, who ruled in the 12th century, to George of Saxony who was king for only two years in the 20th century. The only ones missing are Heinrich I von Eilenburg (c. 1089) and the last king of Saxony, Frederick Augustus III, who ruled from 1904 to 1918. Also shown are 59 scientists, artisans, craftsmen, children and farmers.
On 21 August 1911, the painting was stolen from the Louvre. The theft was not discovered until the next day, when painter Louis Béroud walked into the museum and went to the Salon Carré where the "Mona Lisa" had been on display for five years, only to find four iron pegs on the wall. Béroud contacted the head of the guards, who thought the painting was being photographed for promotional purposes. A few hours later, Béroud checked back with the Section Chief of the Louvre who confirmed that the "Mona Lisa" was not with the photographers. The Louvre was closed for an entire week during the investigation.
Merian was described as lively, hard working and courteous by a visiting scholar in 1711. Her house was full of drawings, insects, plants, fruit and on the walls were her Surinam watercolours. Shortly before Merian's death, her work was seen in Amsterdam by Peter the Great. After her death, he acquired a significant number of her paintings which to this day are kept in academic collections in St. Petersburg.
In 1607 it was part of Cardinal Federico Borromeo’s collection, a provenance which raises the plausibility of a conscious reference to the Book of Amos. Borromeo, who was archbishop of Milan, was in Rome approximately 1597-1602 and a house guest of Del Monte in 1599. He had a special interest in the Northern European painters such as Paul Bril and Jan Brueghel the Elder, who were also in Rome at the time, (indeed, he took Breughel into his own household), and in the way they did landscapes and flowers in paintings as subjects in their own right, something not known at the time in Italian art. He would have seen the way Caravaggio did still life as incidental accessories in paintings such as "Boy Bitten by a Lizard", "Bacchus", in Del Monte's collection, and "The Lute Player" in the collection of Del Monte's friend Vincenzo Giustiniani. The scholarly Giustiniani wrote a treatise on painting years later, wherein, reflecting the hierarchical conventions of his day, he placed flowers "and other tiny things" only fifth on a twelve-scale register, but he said also that Caravaggio once said to him "that it used to take as much workmanship for him to do a good picture of flowers as it did to do one of human figures."
The so-called Templecombe painting, a painting discovered in 1945 by Mrs Molly Drew in the roof of an outhouse of a cottage in Templecombe, England, has been alleged to be a copy of the image on the Turin Shroud, and therefore evidence of the Turin Shroud being in the possession of the Knights Templar during its "hidden years".
The painting has been on display in St Mary's Church in the village since 1956 (the only Templar-related site to have survived there), and has been carbon-dated to c. 1280. Some people believe that it is a Templar-commissioned image of either Jesus Christ or the severed head of John the Baptist, although it is without a Halo.
Vanbrugh's severe massed Baroque used at Blenheim never truly caught the public imagination, and was quickly superseded by the revival of the Palladian style. Vanbrugh's reputation was irreparably damaged, and he received no further truly great public commissions. For his final design, Seaton Delaval Hall, which was hailed as his masterpiece, he used a refined version of the Baroque employed at Blenheim. He died shortly before its completion.
On the evening of October 6, 2002, Tullio Lombardo's marble statue "Adam", part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection, fell to the floor of the Vélez Blanco patio, where it was displayed, and broke into 28 recognizable pieces and hundreds of small fragments. The ensuing investigation uncovered that the unfortunate incident occurred when the wood pedestal that it was displayed on collapsed. After undergoing more than a decade of extensive painstaking process of restoration "Adam" is now on display at the museum. Museum officials say their process for restoring the sculpture helped create a new model on how to conserve large sculptures.
In 2006, the Guinness Book of World Records certified Katlinel and Les Hartness of California as having the largest hand-carved wooden rocking horse on record. This rocking horse was built in 2000 and is 7 feet 8 inches tall and weighs 1,200 pounds. It can be seen at renaissance faires, faerie festivals, and at private parties and events where up to 3 adults or 4-5 children can ride it together at one time. According to Les and Katlinel, the youngest rider has been six weeks old and the oldest, 94 years.
On board during the Trafalgar action was First-Lieutenant James Clephan, who was presented with the ship's Union Jack by the crew after the battle as a mark of their esteem. The flag, recently found in a drawer of one of the descendants of James Clephan, is regarded as one of very few surviving Union Flags from the Battle of Trafalgar, and probably the best preserved. With battle scars still visible, it was sold for £384,000 when it went for auction with specialist maritime auctioneers Charles Miller Ltd in London on Trafalgar Day, 21 October 2009.
The composition depicts the upper reaches of the Grand Canal near the entrance to the Cannaregio Canal. It is a typical example of the "vedute" paintings popular with Grand Tour travelers as a visual record of their stay in Venice.
One of his most important papal commissions was the Raphael Cartoons (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum), a series of 10 cartoons, of which seven survive, for tapestries with scenes of the lives of Saint Paul and Saint Peter, for the Sistine Chapel. The cartoons were sent to Brussels to be woven in the workshop of Pier van Aelst. It is possible that Raphael saw the finished series before his death—they were probably completed in 1520. He also designed and painted the "Loggie" at the Vatican, a long thin gallery then open to a courtyard on one side, decorated with Roman-style grottesche. He produced a number of significant altarpieces, including "The Ecstasy of St. Cecilia" and the "Sistine Madonna". His last work, on which he was working up to his death, was a large "Transfiguration", which together with "Il Spasimo" shows the direction his art was taking in his final years—more proto-Baroque than Mannerist.
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".
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 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.
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.