Peasant Woman Against a Background of Wheat - Vincent van Gogh

Price in US $ - 47.5 million

Peasant Woman Against a Background of Wheat is an 1890 painting by Vincent van Gogh. Van Gogh went on to paint several versions of this painting. The excellent painting was an oil work on a canvas sized 36 1/4 * 28 3/4 (92 * 73 cm). One such version was used in Stanlist political art of 1930; where a peasant woman is portrayed holding sheaves of wheat. This peasant woman represented a complex and controversial image in the lexicon of Soviet political art. Peasant Woman was also depicted in Nikolai Kochergin's poster. In this poster, Nikolai depicted the woman as a buxom woman wearing a kerchief and bast shoes.

Diana and Callisto - Titian

Price in US $ - 70.6 million

Diana and Callisto is a painting completed between 1556 and 1559 by the Venetian artist Titian. It portrays the moment in which the goddess Diana discovers that her maid Callisto has become pregnant by Jupiter. Titian himself referred to his this group of paintings as ‘poesie’, the visual equivalent of poetry.

Police Gazette - Willem de Kooning

Price in US $ - 63.5 million



Willem de Kooning’s Police Gazette, an abstract 1955 landscape, is one of his more abstract canvases, primarily yellow, red and green. It was painted while he was living in New York City before moving to East Hampton, N.Y. By early 1930s Kooning had started experimenting with abstract expressions, using living shapes and simple geometric compositions that suggested the artist’s absolute contrast sense of creating formal elements that prevails in his work throughout his career. de Kooning is considered second only to Pollock in the Abstract Expressionist canon.

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Nude Sitting on a Divan - Amedeo Modigliani

Price in US $ -69 million

Nude Sitting on a Divan (The Beautiful Roman Woman) is an oil on canvas painting by Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani. The work was one of a series of nudes painted by Modigliani in 1917 that created a sensation when exhibited in Paris that year.  Simultaneously abstracted and erotically detailed, they exhibit a formal grace referencing nude figures of the Italian Renaissance

The Paris show of 1917 was Modigliani's only solo exhibition during his life, and is "notorious" in modern art history for its sensational public reception and the attendant issues of obscenity.

No 1 (Royal Red and Blue) - Mark Rothko

Price in US $ - 75.1 million

Mark Rothko’s magisterial abstraction, “No.1 (Royal Red and Blue)” (1954) is one of the most widely exhibited and written-about painting from the collection of Anne and John Marion.  Its impressive history included the artist’s first museum exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it showed alongside eight other Rothkos in 1954, in what was then a contemporary artist showcase. Most of the other examples are now housed in museums, including the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Whitney Museum of American Art. It was described by Sotheby's as "a seminal, large-scale masterpiece".

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The Darmstadt Madonna - Hans Holbein the Younger.

Price in US $ - 75 million

The Darmstadt Madonna (also known as "The Madonna With the Family of Mayor Meyer") is a masterpiece oil painting by Hans Holbein the Younger.

The painting was influenced by Italian Renaissance religious painting, with elements of Netherlandish portrait painting. The painting was earlier located in Darmstadt - hence its title.

Orange, Red, Yellow - Mark Rothko

Price in US $ - 86 million

Orange, Red, Yellow, a 1961 Color Field painting by Mark Rothko, has become the most expensive post-war work sold at auction. The painting's trio of orange and yellow rectangles bobbing atop a cherry-red background forms a palette that's as eye-catching as a sunset or a Popsicle. Rothko's shimmering "colour field" paintings have never been as attention grabbing as his macho Action Painting contemporaries Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.

These subtly spiritual works, when properly lit, are thought to offer a similar lofty experience that one gets in a place of worship, like a cathedral. Only their refusal to associate with language, or any period in art history, mean they transcend the specificity of religion.