Most Expensive Violins Ever Sold: The Verified Results

On This Page

• Results at public auction
• The sales that never reached a saleroom
• One online house sold most of the list
• What the premium did to the record
• Where each famous violin came from
• The baron behind three of them
• Figures I left out
• My case for the Lady Blunt
• Top Takeaways to Success
• Frequently Asked Questions

The most expensive violin ever sold at auction is the 1721 Lady Blunt Stradivari, which made £9,808,000 ($15,875,800) at Tarisio on 20 June 2011. That is the answer in dollars.

Ask the question in pounds and you get a different violin.

Eleven years later Tarisio sold the da Vinci, ex-Seidel Stradivari of about 1714 for $15.34 million, which The Strad reported as £12.29 million. Fewer dollars than the Lady Blunt, about $536,000 fewer. But nearly £2.5 million more in sterling, because the pound bought around $1.62 in 2011 and about $1.25 in June 2022.

Neither figure is wrong. They are the same two sales seen through two exchange rates, and almost every list picks one without saying it had a choice. This page uses dollars at the rate on the day of sale, and flags the flip wherever it matters.

And neither is the highest price paid for a violin. That was $23 million, in private, in 2025.

Results at public auction

Prices are as the auction house or a trade publication reported them, converted to dollars at the time of sale. The premium column says whether the buyer’s premium is included, where the source states it.

#	Violin	Maker, year	Price	Premium	Sale
1	Lady Blunt	Stradivari, 1721	£9,808,000 ($15,875,800)	Included. Hammer £8,750,000	Tarisio online, 20 Jun 2011
2	da Vinci, ex-Seidel	Stradivari, c.1714	$15,340,000 (£12.29m)	Not itemised	Tarisio, 9 Jun 2022
3	Joachim-Ma	Stradivari, 1714	$11,250,000	Included	Sotheby’s New York, 7 Feb 2025
4	Baltic	Guarneri del Gesù, c.1731	$9,440,000	Not itemised	Tarisio New York, 16 Mar 2023
5	Molitor	Stradivari, 1697	$3,600,000	Not itemised	Tarisio, 14 Oct 2010
6	Hammer	Stradivari, 1707	$3,544,000	Not itemised	Christie’s New York, 16 May 2006
7	ex-Pasquier	Guarneri del Gesù, 1736	€3,300,000 (about $3.5m)	Not itemised	Aguttes, Neuilly-sur-Seine, 3 Jun 2022
8	ex-Ysaÿe, Stern, Dennery	Guarneri del Gesù, c.1727 to 1730	€2,314,800 (about $2.73m)	Included	Artcurial, Paris, 16 Dec 2025
9	Folinari	Guarneri del Gesù, c.1725	£1,500,000 ($2.33m)	Not itemised	Tarisio, 25 Jun 2012
10	ex-Kym	Stradivari, 1696	£1,385,000 ($2.27m)	Included	Tarisio, 18 Dec 2013
11	Lady Tennant	Stradivari, 1699	$2,032,000	Not itemised	Christie’s New York, 22 Apr 2005
12	Red Mendelssohn	Stradivari, 1720	$1,776,940	Not itemised	Christie’s London, 21 Nov 1990
13	Kubelík	Stradivari, 1687	$949,500	Not itemised	Tarisio, May 2003
14	Lady Blunt	Stradivari, 1721	£84,000 (about $201,600)	Not itemised	Sotheby’s London, Jun 1971

Row 8 is converted at the European Central Bank reference rate for 16 December 2025, $1.1776 to the euro.

Two rows carry disagreements. For row 7, a French legal-press report gives €3.30 million while The Strad’s headline gave $3.5 million, and Tarisio’s later press release described the previous Guarneri record as $3.6 million. For row 14, Ingles & Hayday records £84,000 and the Tarisio Cozio Archive records £84,500.

The sales that never reached a saleroom

The two biggest violin prices in history are absent from that table because nobody bid for them in public.

Baron Knoop, Stradivari, 1715. $23 million (£17.8 million), March 2025. A private sale to an anonymous buyer, brokered by Joseph Bein of Bein & Co, with Peter Biddulph and Lilly Camden acting for the seller, the American collector David L. Fulton. Fulton had bought it in February 1992 for $2.75 million. That works out at roughly 6.6% a year, compounded over 33 years, before costs.

Vieuxtemps, Guarneri del Gesù, 1741. Reported at over $16 million. Sold privately to an anonymous buyer, who placed it on lifetime loan to the violinist Anne Akiko Meyers. The exact price has never been disclosed. Sources disagree on the year: some reports place the sale in 2012, while The Strad dates it to early January 2013.

Lady Blunt, 2008. Reported at over $10 million. The Nippon Music Foundation bought it privately, through Andrew Hill, three years before consigning it to Tarisio.

Private figures are reported by the people who brokered them. They may be accurate. They cannot be checked against a lot page, and none of them states what commission sat inside the number. At least one arts outlet described the Baron Knoop as a new auction record in March 2025. It was nothing of the kind.

One online house sold most of the list

Seven of the fourteen auction results above went through Tarisio, a house founded in 1999 that sells largely online.

Its December 2013 press release on the ex-Kym sale carried an aside about the wider market: Sotheby’s and Christie’s fine instrument departments had recently closed down. For more than a decade the top of this market moved through timed online auctions, with bidding windows that extend when a late bid arrives. The da Vinci sale ran to eleven bids and five extensions from an $8 million reserve.

Sotheby’s came back for the Joachim-Ma in 2025. It sold below its $12 to $18 million estimate, at $11.25 million including premium. Some outlets rounded that to $11.3 million; a figure of $11.325 million also circulates, and nothing I found at a primary source supports it.

What the premium did to the record

The Lady Blunt hammered at £8,750,000. The premium added £1,058,000, about 12.1% of hammer.

Tarisio’s current terms charge 20% of the hammer price, cut to 18% for a buyer who places both the first and last bid. Apply today’s 20% to the same hammer and the Lady Blunt would have realised £10,500,000. That is arithmetic, not a sale, but it shows how much of the gap between old and new records is fee structure rather than demand.

It also means comparing a 2011 total with a 2022 total is comparing two different contracts. The da Vinci figure was published as a single number, with no hammer stated.

Where each famous violin came from

Lady Blunt. Named for Lady Anne Blunt, granddaughter of Lord Byron, who bought it from the dealer Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume in 1864. The Cozio Archive describes it as surviving with its original neck, fingerboard and bass bar. It sold for £84,000 at Sotheby’s in 1971, then a world record, and for £9,808,000 forty years later. The charity sale came about because its owner, the Nippon Music Foundation, pledged everything to the relief fund after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The winner beat one other bidder after a 90-minute contest.

da Vinci, ex-Seidel. Played for close to four decades by Toscha Seidel, a Leopold Auer pupil whose Hollywood studio work includes the soundtrack of The Wizard of Oz (1939).

Joachim-Ma. Owned from 1849 by Joseph Joachim, who almost certainly gave the premiere of the Brahms Violin Concerto on it. It later passed to Si-Hon Ma, whose estate gave it to the New England Conservatory. The 2025 proceeds went to a student scholarship fund.

Baltic. Consigned by the family of the collector Sau-Wing Lam, who died in 1988. It had been exhibited twice at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

ex-Kym. Stolen from London’s Euston Station in 2010 and recovered by police in the Midlands three years later, undamaged. According to Tarisio’s release, the thief had tried to sell it for £100. A British music festival bought it.

Molitor. Bought by Anne Akiko Meyers, the same violinist who now plays the privately sold Vieuxtemps. Reference books name Napoleon as its first owner; Tarisio’s own 2010 catalogue says that is not known for certain.

The baron behind three of them

Baron Johann Knoop, a collector active around 1900, owned the Lady Blunt (bought through W.E. Hill & Sons in 1896), the Joachim-Ma (in the early twentieth century, per The Strad) and the 1715 Stradivari that still carries his name.

So the auction record, the third-highest auction price and the highest private price ever paid for a violin all passed through one man’s collection. I have not found that link drawn together anywhere else.

Figures I left out

• No estimates as sales. The Macdonald viola was offered by Sotheby’s in a sealed-bid sale in 2014 with an asking price of $45 million. It did not sell. It is also a viola.
• No hammer price for the Hammer. Reports describe $3,544,000 as the winning bid; I could not confirm whether Christie’s figure included premium.
• No inflation-adjusted ranking. Older sales would climb, but the adjustment depends on which index and currency you pick, and that is a choice I would rather show than hide.

My case for the Lady Blunt

I’d still call the Lady Blunt the record, and I would defend it on more than the dollar figure.

Here is my reasoning. The record should be the price that is fully on the table: a public sale, a published hammer, a stated premium, a known date and a known seller. The Lady Blunt has all five. The da Vinci has four, and its sterling lead is a currency event as much as a market one. The pound lost about a quarter of its dollar value between the two sales. Nobody bid more for the violin because of that.

The private sales are a different animal. I don’t doubt the Baron Knoop changed hands for something near $23 million. But a record you cannot check is a claim, and the violin trade has a long habit of letting private numbers do its marketing.

What strikes me most is how thin this market is. Two Stradivari sales above $15 million in fifteen years. One del Gesù above $5 million at auction, the Baltic, in everything I could find. A single bidder dropping out of the Lady Blunt contest would have changed the history of the category. Compare that with guitars, where five of the ten highest prices fell on one afternoon in 2026 (see the most expensive guitars). Even the Black Strat’s $14,550,000 sits below the Lady Blunt.

Stamps make a useful contrast. The most expensive stamp has already been back to auction and sold for less than its record. As far as I could find, none of the top four violins in the table has returned to a public sale since, so nobody knows whether those prices would hold.

For record prices across every category, see the most expensive things ever sold.