1744
Sam Baker was an entrepreneur, occasional publisher and successful bookseller, owned book stores. When he had several hundred scarce and valuable boks in all branchesof literature Baker decided to rent the premises of one of the pubs and hold fairs. But the prices for these books were fixed and coincided with the prices in his stores.
And was decided to try the Dutch system of conducting auctions, the starting price and the winner whose bid is higher.
Baker died, he had no heirs, and his estate was divided between his nephew John Sotheby’s and partner George Leigh. The auction was later called Sotheby’s
At that time, there was already a Christies auction, but the difference was that it exhibited luxury items, while Sotheby’s sold valuable publications from the libraries of the Dukes of York and Buckingham Palace.
1778
1861
Sotheby’s ceased to be a family business, the family was interrupted. Accountant John Wilkinson bought all the shares with his partner Edward Hodge and the company became Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge until 1924
The new owners became a member of the British Parliament Montague Barlow, businessmen Felix Warr, Geoffrey Hobson a young foreign officel. From that moment, the auction began to sell paintings, coins, medals and antiques, but the focus was still on books.
Their second triumph, during the summer of 1917, was to move the company’s premises from Wellington Street – off the Strand – to 34-35 New Bond Street in Mayfair.
1909
1920
Profits began to grow, they sold their estates and antiques through auction, and against this background, competition with the Christies auction intensified and Barlow lowered the commission from 12.5% to 7.5%
The international development of the auction began in such cities as New York, Paris, LA, Zurich, Toronto, Melbourne, Munich, Florence.This was a big plus, in these cities taxes on antiques were much lower than in Great Britain.
1955
1980
The auction was on the verge of bankruptcy due to the industrial crisis in the country.
The developer A. Alfred Taubman bought the auction
1983
1988
The company became public
An auction sold the personal belongings of the Windsor family for 34 million U.S.
1998
1999
Sotheby’s together with Amazon launched an online auction. The auction guaranteed the authenticity of the lots and their examination, and Amazon paid and delivered.
Pioneers in the field of e-commerce
2000
2017
Recently brought scientific research
Artificial intelligence in-house
2018
2019
Sotheby’s again became a private company. Media magnate Patrick Drahi became the owner, the amount of the deal is 3.7 billion U.S.
With the cancellation of art fairs and traditional auctions due to the global pandemic, Sotheby’s was the first auction house to successfully shift to a hybrid digital auction format and create new mobile and web experiences to drive a much larger portion of sales online.
