A crowded, swirling scene in which soldiers, many of them nude, attack mothers and infants before a classical architectural background. Small bodies lie on the ground.

Catalogue No. 1924 · Sotheby's · London

The Massacre of the Innocents

Sold for

$76.6million

Sotheby's, London · 10 July 2002 · 22nd of 392 in the Record Book

About $143.3 million in today’s money: 1,600 years of the typical US household’s income. Source

Artist: Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577–1640)
Title: The Massacre of the Innocents
Date: c. 1609–11
Medium: Oil on panel
Size: 142 × 183 cm (55 7/8 × 72 1/16 in)

Rubens painted this scene of King Herod's order to kill the infant boys of Bethlehem soon after returning to Antwerp from Italy, between about 1609 and 1611. The Sotheby's specialist George Gordon describes a swirling composition in which soldiers, many of them nude, attack mothers and children in front of a classical architectural setting.

For long stretches of its history the panel was not credited to Rubens. Liechtenstein records from 1780 reportedly gave it to his assistant Jan van den Hoecke, and an Austrian family later lent it to a monastery. In 2001 Gordon looked at a photograph and, after study, recognised the hand of Rubens. Le Journal des Arts reported that its link to Samson and Delilah, which once hung beside it in Vienna, helped persuade scholars.

Sotheby's offered it in London on 10 July 2002 as lot 6, with an estimate of £4 million to £6 million. The price with buyer's premium was £49,506,650, or about $76.6 million. The Thomson family bought it, and it now belongs to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

The sale

Auction house: Sotheby's, London
Date: 10 July 2002
Lot: 6
Estimate: £4,000,000–£6,000,000
Sold for: $76.6 million (including buyer’s premium) · £49,506,650
Record: Sotheby's says (2025) that the painting still holds the record for the highest price paid anywhere for a rediscovered painting. At the time of the sale it was the most expensive painting sold at auction in Britain, and the New York Times called it a world record for an Old Master painting. (as of October 2026)

Estimate Price · sold for 8.3 times the high estimate. Estimates don’t include the buyer’s premium; the price does.

Test your eye on the market: set your estimates

Provenance

c. 1700–1920
In the collection of the Princes of Liechtenstein, Vienna; Le Journal des Arts says it hung beside Rubens's Samson and Delilah in the prince's summer residence from 1702, and Sotheby's George Gordon says it stayed with the princes from around 1700 until about 1919.
1920
Sold by the Liechtenstein family to a dealer, who sold it the same year to the father of the later Austrian owner (the Independent: bought from a dealer in Vienna).
1930s
The Independent says it was exhibited by a dealer in Dresden. Reported
1930s–spring 1945
The Independent says it hung in the Vienna office of the vendor's husband until spring 1945, and was moved to Salzburg when the office building was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid. Reported
1973
The Independent says it was sent on loan to Stift Reichersberg, a monastery in Austria. Reported
2002-07-10
Sold at Sotheby's, London, lot 6; the Independent says the dealer Sam Fogg bought it for a private collector, and the Telegraph reported the buyer as David Thomson, acting for his father, Lord Thomson of Fleet.
2014
Credit line: The Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario, 2014 (object number 2014/1581).

See it on a wall

1.42 m × 1.83 m (55.9 × 72 in), beside a person 1.70 m tall

Sources

Prices include the buyer’s premium, in US dollars at the time of sale, unless marked as a hammer price.

Correct the record

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