Very few objects on Earth are worth $100 million, yet some paintings have sold for even more. These masterpieces capture genius, emotion, nature, love, and life on a single canvas, securing their place in art history. Here is a roundup of twelve of the world's most expensive paintings.
12. Paul Cezanne, La Montagne Sainte-Victoire
Paul Cézanne was a native of the South of France, born and raised in Aix-en-Provence. He divided his life between Paris and Provence, and one of his recurring motifs was Mont Sainte-Victoire, a limestone mountain in Provence. He painted the massif repeatedly during the last 28 years of his life, when he lived permanently in Provence. This version is one of the most spectacular left in private hands (most are in the world's top museums), and his flattening technique foreshadowed the rise of Cubism. The painting's great significance in art history was reflected in its price: $137.7 million.
11. Pablo Picasso, Femme à la montre
Pablo Picasso's Femme à la montre was painted in 1932, a particularly prolific year for Picasso when he produced some of his most acclaimed works inspired by his muse and mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter. The portrait, a whimsical geometric composition in punchy primary colors, is Picasso at his best, as echoed in its impressive sale price of $139.4 million at Sotheby's in November 2023. The masterpiece was the most expensive painting sold in 2023, as well as Picasso's second most expensive painting ever sold.
10. Qi Bashi, Twelve Landscape Screens
The only work on this list to be sold outside of the United States, at Beijing Poly International Auction in China, Twelve Landscape Screens is a series of ink-brush panels that fetched $140.8 million in 2017. Considered the most important modern Chinese painter, Qi Bashi's work was deeply steeped in Chinese art principles, showing no Western inspiration, and focused on landscapes, animals and botany. The Twelve Landscape Screens from 1925 is one of Bashi's few large-scale works, and the only other version Bashi made is in a Chinese museum.
Related: China’s 7 Most Influential Contemporary Artists
9. Francis Bacon, Three Studies of Lucien Freud
Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud's friendship was fraught with professional jealousy and deep admiration. Both artists painted portraits of the other in the 1950s and '60s, before an argument permanently ended their relationship in the mid-1970s. Bacon's triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) was sold as three separate paintings in the 1970s to Bacon's acute dismay. However, the three works were later reunited as a triptych and set a record for the artist, selling for $142.4 million to Elaine Wynn, the ex-wife of Las Vegas mogul Steve Wynn.
Related: Obsessive Love: Francis Bacon and Peter Lacy
8. Georges Seurat, Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version)
The most expensive work of Microsoft founder Paul Allen's $1.6 billion art collection, Georges Seurat's Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version) sold for $149.2 million. The Pointillist work was a response to pervading criticism of Seurat's masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-86), which was decried as too stiff and formal to properly depict modern life. With part of A Sunday Afternoon [...] in the background, three nude models pose casually in front of the canvas. He painted two versions of Les Poseuses, with the larger version in the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia.
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7. Amedeo Modigliani, Nu Couché
The largest of Amedeo Modigliani's 35 nude paintings painted between 1916-19, Nu Couché (sur le côté guache) (Nude lying on the left side) broke records as Sotheby's all-time highest sale when it achieved $157.1 million in 2018. The extraordinary work, painted in 1917, was a reinterpretation of the classical nude in the context of modern art. While today widely praised and admired, the nudes of Modigliani were not so well received when first shown in 1917, and the Paris police even shut the gallery exhibit down.
Related: Five Centuries of the Nude in Painting
6. Amedeo Modigliani, Nu Couché
This famous nude, also possibly part of the 1917 Paris show, reinforces the image of a classical nude, harkening to Renaissance representations of Venus in her reclining posture. It sold at Christie's in 2015 for $170.4 million to Liu Yiqian, a Chinese billionaire and art collector.
5. Pablo Picasso, Les Femmes d'Alger
Picasso's masterpiece Les Femmes d'Alger (1955) was the final version, titled 'O', in a series of 15. A modernist interpretation of Eugene Delacroix's The Woman of Algiers in their Apartment (1834), Picasso's colorful Cubist melange of figures and limbs are a study in color and decadence, which inspired him later that year to buy La Californie, a villa in the South of France. Version 'O' sold in May 2015 for $179.4 million to the former Prime Minister of Qatar. The other lettered versions have sold to private collections or museums.
Related: 10 Record-Breaking Artworks and Who Bought Them
4. Jackson Pollock, Number 7A, 1948
Single-owner sales of blue-chip collections assembled over decades have become a defining feature of today’s auction market — with the Paul G. Allen Collection, which appears several times on this list, standing as the most prominent example. Close behind is the collection of publisher S.I. Newhouse, which has been dispersed in a series of sales since 2019. During the latest New York Marquee Week, on the evening of May 18, 2026, Christie's presented another 16 works from the collection. The sale was led by Jackson Pollock’s Number 7A, 1948, created during one of the most significant periods of the artist’s career. Carrying an estimate of around $100 million, the painting ultimately achieved $181.2 million, more than tripling Pollock’s previous auction record.
3. Andy Warhol, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn
Andy Warhol's iconic Shot Sage Blue Marilyn sold for a staggering $195 million at Christie's in May 2022. Warhol began creating screen prints of Marilyn Monroe after the actress' death in August 1962. The painting is part of the "Shot Marilyns" series that also includes four other versions in red, orange, blue and turquoise. The title derives from a curious incident, when the performative artist Dorothy Podber asked Warhol for permission to shoot the works in 1964. But, instead of photographing the works as expected, Podber pulled out a revolver and fired at the stack of canvases. Thus was born the series “The Shot Marilyns." This blue work was acquired by Thomas and Doris Ammann, siblings who ran Thomas Ammann Fine Art, a gallery in Zurich, from Si Newhouse, the Conde Nast heir, in the 1980s.
Related: A History of the Smile in Art
2. Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer
In November 2025, Sotheby’s New York presented a much anticipated work from Leonard A. Lauder’s private collection. Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914–1916) sold for $236.4 million after a prolonged round of bidding. The painting had been estimated at about $150 million, and six bidders competed for roughly twenty minutes. The final price set a new auction record for Klimt and for any modern artwork, making it the second most expensive work ever sold at auction.
1. Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Mundi
The most valuable painting ever sold, Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi (Savior of the World), depicting Jesus holding a glowing orb with his hand raised in blessing, was likely painted in 1500. The masterpiece passed through the collections of British royalty in following centuries but became damaged and heavily repainted over time. After turning up at a New Orleans auction in 2005 and selling for $10,000, it was carefully restored to its former grandeur and verified as the last da Vinci masterpiece. In November 2017, the work sold for $450.3 million at Christie's New York to Saudi Arabian prince Badr bin Abdullah, likely on behalf of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Since its record-setting sale, questions of its whereabouts have swirled. The painting was originally promised to the Louvre Abu Dhabi but hasn't been seen in public since its sale. In 2019, it was reported that is on the Crown Prince's yacht.
