The art market is big business, growing for the first time in 2 years to a worth of $59.6 billion in 2025.
Auctioneers, artists and other people in the business often look to the past to research and plan current and future sales, checking provenance details and observing industry trends. To do this, they access historical sales catalogues.
A very popular section of the National Art Library’s collection are our sales catalogues. With the closure of many libraries associated with auction houses in recent years, our collection is in high demand as we often hold one of the only accessible copies in the UK, or even the world. Many users visit us seeking copies of sales ranging from large multinational organisations to small local auction houses, dating all the way back to the 17th century.
The enormous number of catalogues, and the data they comprise of, can be overwhelming to those not familiar with the world of art sales. The NAL’s holdings consist of many decades worth of collecting and cataloguing by library staff. This can result in some complex records for users to decipher when it comes to finding what they’re looking for.
Although we do not hold every single art auction catalogue in existence, we have a strong collection covering sales from auction houses worldwide, large and small, mostly concentrating on sales of the fine and decorative arts.
Finding a sale in print
The single most useful piece of information to find your desired catalogue is the date the sale took place. If you have this information, you are halfway there! If you are looking for a regular sale that took place after 1800, it is likely to be found by conducting a date of sale search.
The NAL catalogue makes it easy to find the item via date of sale. Simply type your sale date into the search bar in this format: ds: YYYYMMDD. For example, searching ‘ds: 19910924’ will show you all 4 sales that took place on 24th September 1991 in our collection. You can then discern the catalogue you need from these search results, based on any further information you can get from the record eg. type of sale, auction house, location etc.
Trying a string of keywords can also work if you don’t know the exact date, before narrowing down the publication year using our filters, e.g. if you are looking for a sale of English furniture in the 1990s at Sotheby’s, search ‘English furniture Sotheby’s’ in the main search bar, before setting the ‘Publication Year’ filter in the right-hand side tool bar from 1990 through 1999 will bring up 27 results from that period to browse through.
One important thing to note is that when you find the sale you’re looking for, it might not have the usual ‘Request Item’ button on the right-hand side. In this case, look for the link under the More Information heading on the left. Clicking on this will lead you to a page where you can request the volume your catalogue is bound into. In the past, catalogues from a similar timeframe would often be compiled and bound into one volume rather than kept separate.
If you are looking for sales data beyond the lots themselves, such as estimates, reserve and hammer prices (the predicted and final bid sums for a lot), this can be harder to find for older sales. We do have some resources that could help.
We have a unique run of priced catalogues with handwritten annotations for several major auction houses who operated in London. These include:
- Christie’s London – 1867-1965
- Foster (also known as Foster & Son) catalogues – 1825-1937
- Foster sales ledgers – 1928-1937
- Knight Frank & Rutley – 1896-1969
- Sotheby’s London – 1926-1965
Within these ranges, holdings are not always comprehensive.
Some priced catalogues from the range above are not yet recorded on our online library catalogue and cannot be requested there. If you are looking to place a request for one of these, please contact us in advance of your visit and we can complete a manual request form.
Some later catalogues, after these time periods, include printed price lists bound in with the catalogue. However, this is not universal and is usually mentioned in the ‘Notes (general)’ section of the item record.
This reading list includes direct links to some of the sources mentioned above, and other useful titles:
Course Details for Subject Guide – Art Auction Sales, Sales Catalogues and Price Guides (Print)
Finding a sale online
If you cannot find the information you need in our printed catalogues, you may want to try our online resources.
Art Sales Catalogues Online
In his impressive four-volume work Répertoire des catalogues de ventes publiques intéressant l’art ou la curiosité, (Repertory of Catalogues of Public Sale concerned with Art or Objets d’art) Frits Lugt (1884–1970) covered the period 1600 to 1925, listing over 100,000 sales catalogues in chronological order and assigning them a number. References may still record this ‘Lugt number’ as a way of locating the sale.
Although the NAL does have print copies of Lugt’s works, the print copies and sales catalogues housed in the NAL referenced within, have been combined with those of other libraries worldwide in the Art Sales Catalogues Online database. It is also a lot quicker and easier to search ASCO rather than browsing the very large and complex physical copies. This database gives full records of each sale and in many cases, access to a scanned copy of the catalogue. If you have the Lugt number, it’s very easy to find the sale using the search on the site.
Artprice
‘The world leader in art market information’, Artprice.com is an online database covering over 30 million auction results, with coverage from the late 1980s onwards, spanning 913,200 artists. On here you can search for artworks by title or artist, and find data relating to their sales, as well as artist profiles showing past and present sales and their prices, to build up a contextual picture of the artist’s position in the market. Artprice is a good place to start if you are searching for more modern works, or something you know has been sold recently.
The NAL allows access to both these great databases via the computers in our reading rooms or by connecting your own device to our NAL Wi-Fi when you are onsite in V&A South Kensington or V&A East Storehouse. Licensing restrictions mean these databases cannot be accessed offsite by public users.
This list contains direct links to various sales resources you can access when onsite:
Course Details for E-Resources – Art Auction Sales, Sales Catalogues and Price Guides
Hopefully our auction collections have now been demystified, and you feel more confident searching for that elusive sale! If you are still not having any luck finding the one you need, get in touch with us via our enquiries platform and we can try and help:
