Garçon à la pipe by Pablo Picasso
So far the highest price a painting has ever fetched at auction (as the others were all sold privately), and was the first painting to break the $100 million barrier (it was sold in 2004). The strange thing is that it was never made public as to who expressed such an interest in Picasso’s portrait of a smoking Parisian.
Garçon à la pipe replaced Portrait of Doctor Gachet by Vincent Van Gogh which sold for a pittance of only $82.5 million.
The oil on canvas painting, measuring 100 × 81.3 cm (slightly over 39 × 32 inches), depicts a Parisian boy holding a pipe in his left hand. The boy in the painting was among the community of entertainers living in the Montmartre section of Paris. On May 5, 2004 it sold for $104.1 million USD at an auction in Sotheby's in New York, after having been given a pre-sale estimate of $70 million by the auction house.
Garçon à la pipe by Pablo Picasso
