American Art

Sotheby’s new sale platform for American Art integrates our 20^th Century genres into our New York sales of Modern and Contemporary Art which take place in May and November of each year. This strategic step recontextualizes American artists alongside their worldly counterparts.

This strategy has already proved successful. In recent years Sotheby’s has broadened the scope of our Modern and Contemporary Art categories by integrating high-quality examples from the category. Yielding tremendous results for our consignors and regularly setting world record prices, works of American art offered in this context outperformed their low estimates by an average of 34%--more than 10 percentage points higher than the industry average.

19^th Century American Art – Gilbert Stuart to Winslow Homer – are sold in stand-alone auctions held biannually with a live sale positioned in January alongside Americana Week in New York and an online sale each May alongside our Master Paintings and 19^th Century European Paintings sales.

The passion and expertise of our specialists, combined with the global reach of our auctions, has consistently produced outstanding results and numerous auction records. Indeed, Sotheby’s is driving the current market for American art. Our team has achieved 3 of the top 5 prices for the category since 2020, with nearly 4 bidders competing for each lot of American art sold.