The Card Players by Paul Cezanne, currently the world's most expensive work of art.
There has been rumors circulating for months about Cezanne’s painting The Card Players. Now it has emerged that the work – one of a series painted in the 1890’s – has become the most expensive painting in the world. The Qatari Royal Family paid £158 million ($250 million) for the painting. The previous record for a work of art was the £88.7 million paid for Jackson Pollock’s No. 5 1948 in 2006.
The Card Players was bought from the estate of George Embiricos, a Greek shipping magnate. Qatar was ranked the world’s biggest art buyer last year by The Art Newspaper.
There are four other Cézanne Card Players in the series; and they are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée d’Orsay, the Courtauld, and the Barnes Foundation.