Old Masters Part I totalled £13,990,200 and was led by Sir Anthony van Dyck’s monumental depiction of an Andalusian horse, realising £3,428,000 after competitive bidding. In the same sale, Giambattista Tiepolo’s whimsical Guilty Punchinello was acquired by the Louvre for well over its high estimate at £2,460,000. A portrait of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger by a follower of Hans Holbein II made a staggering £327,600, far exceeding its estimate of £40,000–60,000, in Old Masters Part II. The sale overall delivered strong results across a broad spectrum of European schools and artistic disciplines.

Prints by Rembrandt from the collection of Sam Josefowitz performed spectacularly in a white-glove sale totalling £5,554,664. The success of the auction was crowned by the artist’s graphic masterpiece of 1653, Christ Crucified Between the Two Thieves: ‘The Three Crosses’, which took top billing at £1,250,000 and was among the many record prices achieved for prints by the artist. The results of the auction Antiquities from the Mougins Museum of Classical Art further demonstrate the strong demand for well-provenanced museum-quality works. The top lot of the sale was the Beth Shean Herm, which realised £567,000 — more than twice its previous auction price in 2008.

Headlining the Valuable Books and Manuscripts sale, a 16th-century German Bible translated by Martin Luther and a panoramic view of Kolkata, nearly half a metre in length, doubled their pre-sale high estimates at £604,800 and £327,600, respectively. Making its debut, the Science Fiction and Fantasy online auction presented objects, artworks and books, including John Harris’s original dust-jacket artwork for Ender’s Game, which soared way above its £30,000–50,000 estimate at £504,000 and a rare copy of The Dune Bible, which sold for £277,200.

In a dramatic finale to the 2024 London auctions, three dinosaur fossils: a stegosaurus and a juvenile and adult allosaurus, sold for £12,405,000 in a highly competitive live auction. The sale of these 150-million-year-old prehistoric giants marked a dinosaur’s first appearance at King Street, adding a thrilling dimension to this important event in Christie’s history. Treasure more moments in time during Classic Week in New York this February.