Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh

It's very strange what happens to the piece of art once it becomes to be percepted as a masterpiece. For all those people asking how much are Sunflowers it is not the art at all. They are excited by an artefact of richness and fame, which is actually very sad, because none of them can get into relation with a real painting. And none of them is interested in it. So what about the passion and terrible sadness which emanate from the Sunflowers?

"1987 - A painting by Vincent Van Gogh has been sold for $49m (£27m) - a world record for a work of art. The final price was more than twice what the painting, called Irises, had been expected to reach. (...)
The previous record for a painting was set in March by another Van Gogh masterpiece, Sunflowers. It was bought in London for just under $40m by a Japanese insurance company."

"In the spring of 1888 he [Reid] presented his father, James Reid, with two paintings by Van Gogh. The first was Still Life, Basket of Apples; the second was a portrait of Reid himself (...)His father later sold them to a French dealer for £10 each.
The (...) Moulin-de Blute-fin (...) was sold by Reid to another Glasgow collector, William McInnes, in July 1921 for £550. By the early 1920s, prices for Van Gogh's work were on the rise; and the first of a flurry of fakes were appearing. In 1923 Sir James Murray, an Aberdeen collector, acquired Still Life with Daisies and Poppies, which turned out to be a forgery.(...)
[Portrait of Alexander Reid] was eventually bought by Glasgow Museums in 1974 for £166,250.(...)
Olive Trees was painted outside the asylum in St-Rémy in 1889. It was first acquired in 1923 for £275. Today, the piece has strong Scottish ties, having been bought by the National Gallery for £1,600 in 1934.

Some recent figures:

1921 Gainsborough Blue Boy £148,000 (equivalent to £4.5 million today)
1970 Velasquez Juan de Pareja £2.3million (equivalent to £21million today)
1987 Van Gogh Sunflowers £22.5 million (equivalent to £39 million today)
1990 Van Gogh Dr Gachet £44 million (equivalent to £61million today)
(...)
Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents sold in 2002 for £49.5 million = £11,000 per square inch
Van Gogh’s Dr Gachet sold in 1990 for £44 million = £66,000 per square inch
Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks sold in 2004 for £35 million = £341,130 per square inch
Picasso’s Boy with a Pipe sold in 2004 for £58 million = £45,312 per square inch

2006 The New York Times said the city's Neue Galerie paid $135m (£73m) for the oil painting [The portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer by G. Klimt]in a private sale.

The $140m quoted as the price obtained by Sotheby's for Pollock's Number 5, 1948 would make it the highest figure known to have ever been paid for a painting.