1 Kings 4:21, 29â34. The Israelites came to King Solomon when they needed help. One day two women came to him with a baby boy. The women said they lived in the same house. They each had a baby, but one of the babies died. Now both women wanted the baby that was alive. Each mother said he was her baby. They wanted King Solomon to tell them who could keep the baby.
The earliest sale on the list below (Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh) is from March 1987; with a price of Â£24.75 million (Â£62.8 million in current value) it tripled the previous record and introduced a new era in top art sales.
The latter has often been compared with Rembrandt in the number and expressiveness of his self-portraits but while Rembrandt's were distributed through a lifetime, van Gogh produced some thirty in all in the short space of five years â from the end of the Brabant period (1885) to the last year of his life at SaintâRÃ©my and Auvers.