Episode 1 of 2
Earliest surviving auction catalogue
- When
- December 1766
- Where
- Christie's, London
- Part of
- First Christie's Auction
The earliest auction catalogue retained by Christie's dates from December 1766, corroborating the December founding of the house.
Alongside the company's account of the 5 December 1766 first sale, the earliest auction catalogue that Christie's retains is from December 1766. This documentary survival supports the traditional founding date of the firm, even though other evidence—newspaper advertisements from 1759 and rented auction rooms from 1762—indicates that Christie had been conducting sales earlier in the decade.
Sources
- Christie's Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-10
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.