Sotheby's sold books for over a century before it handled paintings
Sotheby's began in London in 1744 as a bookseller's auction room, and handled Napoleon's exile library long before it bothered with fine art. Its first big painting sale, a Frans Hals for nine thousand guineas, came only in 1913. Today it runs 80 locations in 40 countries from New York.
Samuel Baker founded the business on 11 March 1744. After he sold several hundred valuable books from Sir John Stanley's library, he took George Leigh into partnership in 1767, and when Baker died in 1778 his nephew John Sotheby inherited a share, giving the firm the name it would keep. Under the Sotheby family it widened into prints, medals and coins; the senior accountant John Wilkinson took charge after the last family member died in 1861. In 1917 it moved to New Bond Street, still its London base, and soon challenged Christie's for the top of the London market.
Expansion came in the postwar decades. Buying Parke-Bernet in 1964, then the biggest American fine art auctioneer, gave it a New York foothold. Offices in Paris and Los Angeles opened in 1967, and it became the first auction house to trade in Hong Kong in 1973 and in Moscow in 1988. In 2012 it took an 80 percent stake in a Beijing venture, making it the first international auctioneer in China.
Much of the money increasingly came from private deals rather than the hammer. In 1990 a partnership with the dealer William Acquavella paid $143 million for the Pierre Matisse Gallery's stock, roughly 2,300 works including pieces by Miró and Chagall. Not every purchase worked: a Dutch dealership bought in 2006 for $82.5 million closed in 2013 after an $8.3 million inventory write-down. The 2008 crash hit hard; in what artprice.com called Black October, 27 percent of Sotheby's lots went unsold, fewer than at Christie's.
Ownership changed in June 2019, when the telecoms investor Patrick Drahi bought the company at a 61 percent premium to its market price. He cut costs sharply, with layoffs, pandemic salary cuts and a shift to online sales, and announced the end of the staff pension plan in 2022. In 2020 Sotheby's passed Christie's in total sales for the first time since 2011, with more than $5 billion against $4.4 billion. It later agreed to buy the Marcel Breuer building at 945 Madison Avenue for its headquarters. Its auctioneers even appear in the 1983 Bond film Octopussy.
Source: Sotheby's
