Famous auctioneers: what the best ones do on the rostrum

Ask who the famous auctioneers are and you get a strange mix of answers. A Finn who sold the most expensive painting in history. An antiques dealer who became the youngest expert on Bargain Hunt at 25. A cattle auctioneer from Montana whose rhythm has been scored by judges in a competition ring. They share a job title and almost nothing else.

I’m Kevin Durham, the charity auctioneer who works the floor rather than the podium, 20 years in and over £10 million raised. Below are the practitioners worth studying, what each is genuinely known for, and the craft points a fundraiser can lift from them. Every fact here comes from a source you can open yourself.

The famous auctioneers worth studying

Start with the man whose name is still above the door. James Christie was born in Perth in 1730 and held his first sale on 5 December 1766, in Pall Mall rooms that had belonged to a print seller. The Royal Academy held its exhibitions on those same premises until 1779, which tells you something about the company auctions kept from the beginning.

The other historical name worth knowing is Peter Cecil Wilson, who chaired Sotheby’s until 1980, was made a CBE in 1970 and became the firm’s honorary life president when he stepped down.

Everyone after that is living, so I am sticking to what their own sources say. These are the ones whose footage I would actually sit and watch.

Jussi Pylkkänen and the 19-minute lot

Pylkkänen is the one most people have seen without knowing his name. Helsinki-born, at Christie’s since the 1980s, head of the Impressionist and modern art department from 1995, then global president from 2014.

On 15 November 2017 he sold Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi in New York for $450.3 million with fees, the highest price ever paid for a painting at public auction. The detail worth noticing is not the number. It is that the bidding ran for 19 minutes. He also took the rostrum in 2022 when Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn made $195 million.

Nineteen minutes on one lot means refusing to fill silence. Most inexperienced hosts talk over a pause because the pause frightens them. The pause is where the next bid comes from.

Oliver Barker and the hammer he was terrified to drop

On 5 October 2018 Sotheby’s London sold Banksy’s Girl with Balloon for £1,042,000, and within seconds of the gavel the canvas began shredding itself through the bottom of its frame. The half-destroyed work was renamed Love Is in the Bin.

Three years later Oliver Barker brought it back to the same room. After a ten-minute contest involving nine bidders in the saleroom, online and on the phone, it sold for £18,582,000 with premium, three times the high estimate. Barker joked from the rostrum that he was terrified to bring the hammer down, with staff half-expecting another stunt.

Saying the nerve out loud, lightly, is a technique. It puts the room on your side. Pretending nothing odd is happening never does, because everyone can see it anyway.

Who teaches an auctioneer the increments?

At Christie’s, that job belonged to Hugh Edmeades, described as the auction house’s head of auctioneering. One of his trainees, Marlous Jens, was one of 44 internal applicants cut down over about 18 months to two.

The first thing candidates are handed is the sheet of bid increments, and they learn it by heart. Monocle called it the bedrock of the trade. Edmeades put it better: “I can’t teach them the numbers. I can only teach them what to do with the numbers.”

That is the single most transferable idea on this page. Increments are not arithmetic, they are pacing. Jump too far and you lose the second bidder. Crawl in fifties and a room that was ready to compete starts checking its phone. Coaching also covered looking up at the camera and across to the phone banks, because an auctioneer who only plays to the front three tables is leaving money in the room. Whoever holds the room holds the total.

What does a benefit auctioneer do differently?

A benefit auctioneer sells feeling before anything else, and Lydia Fenet is the clearest example. She spent two decades at Christie’s, launched its strategic partnerships division in 2011 and became Global Managing Director of it. The auctioneering ran alongside that job, not instead of it.

Her fundraising total is reported two ways, so treat it carefully: the career section of her Wikipedia entry says over half a billion dollars for nonprofits, while the headline figure of a billion carries a citation-needed tag. She wrote The Most Powerful Woman in the Room Is You in 2019 and Claim Your Confidence in 2022, and she founded what one host describes as the first auctioneering talent agency, which reported over $210 million raised for charitable organisations in its first two years.

The point for a fundraiser is the career shape. A commercial rostrum sells objects to people who already want them. A benefit auctioneer has to build the wanting first, which is why the live pledge sits where it does in my running order.

What can a fundraiser learn from a livestock champion?

Rhythm, and the discipline of being judged on it. Jace Thompson of Billings, Montana was named the 2026 world champion of livestock auctioneering at the Livestock Marketing Association’s convention in Deadwood, South Dakota, after the contest ran at St. Onge Livestock. His father Ty is a past champion, which makes the Thompsons a rare father-and-son pair on that list.

The chant is real craft and I respect it. I also almost never use it. A cattle ring is full of buyers who read bid calling fluently; a gala is full of guests who have never bid on anything. Clarity beats speed when half the room needs to be told what the next number is.

What does carry over is the metronome underneath it. Momentum is a tempo you set, not a mood that happens to you.

Which famous auctioneers came through television?

In the UK, mostly the antiques trade. Charles Hanson joined Bargain Hunt in 2002 as its youngest expert at 25, then Antiques Road Trip and Flog It. He had started at Christie’s in London, and founded his own saleroom, Hansons, in 2005.

His charity work is on the record too: over £133,000 for Nottinghamshire Hospice auctioning robin sculptures, and more than £1 million for Manchester’s Bee in the City.

He calls an auction a place of theatre and entertainment. I would not argue.

Harry Dalmeny took a different route. He joined Sotheby’s in 1990 in the country house sale department, became a director in 2000, deputy chairman of the UK business in 2007 and chairman in 2017, conducting country house sales across Europe along the way.

What do famous auctioneers have in common?

Four things, and none of them is volume.

• They know the increments cold, so their attention is free for the room rather than the maths.
• They tolerate silence. The 19-minute lot is the proof.
• They narrate the contest instead of the object. Nine bidders needed naming, not the frame.
• They stop. A lot sold at the right moment protects the next one, and an auctioneer who grinds for one more bid teaches the room that bidding is painful.

Knowing when to stop is the least glamorous skill on that list and the one I would hire for first. It also applies to the whole programme, not just a lot. At the Jigsaw Trust the auction was expected to bring in £14,000. It made £27,000, and the live pledge they had not planned for raised a further £30,600. That only works if the auction finishes while the room still has appetite.

Do you need a famous auctioneer at your gala?

No, you need the right one, and the two are not the same thing. Fame in this trade is usually built on the art market or on television, and neither is a test of whether someone can lift a room of 300 people who came for dinner.

What to ask instead: what did the last three events raise against target, how do they structure a pledge, and will they work the floor. If you want the longer version, I have written about what auctioneers do and what separates a professional auctioneer from a willing volunteer, and my auctioneer services page sets out how an event comes together from first call to final total. There is also a plain guide to working together if you have never booked one before.

Twenty years in, over £10 million raised, and a Monaco gala that passed €1,000,000 in a single evening. None of that was my doing alone: it was a powerful team behind a powerful charity, and my job was to hold the room while they did theirs.

Call 07596 851647 and tell me about your event.