The auction house is the public face of the art market. When the hammer falls, the price of an artwork can make headlines around the world, astounding and confounding many with the eventual result, whether selling for a new world record, only finding one bidder and scraping away or failing to find a buyer when pre-sale expectations and rhetoric were raging high.

Join us as we look at the origins and development of London’s great auction houses, studying the notable characters in their histories, exploring the controversies and mapping their growth from small individual enterprises to monolithic international institutions. Many of London’s great auction houses have been around for over 200 years. This talk aims to give a succinct and colourful introduction to their histories. With one eye on the past we can give shrewd insight into their current practice and how they plan to place themselves in the art market of the future.