# The Price Is in a Currency That No Longer Exists > Of 187 auction results in this archive, 106 state a currency and they use sixteen different descriptions of it. Guineas, livres tournois, Roman scudi and four ingots of silver do not convert. > The Study - 2026-08-25 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/study/the-price-is-in-a-currency-that-no-longer-exists/ ## Key points - Of 187 auction results across 111 published records in this archive, 106 state a currency, and those 106 use sixteen distinct descriptions of what the money was. They resolve to about ten units of account, including the livre tournois, the Roman scudo, the Dutch guilder and, on one object, silver by weight. - The guinea was demonetised in the Great Recoinage of 1816 and London salerooms went on taking bids in it into the 1970s. The world record price for a painting set at Christie's on 27 November 1970 was struck in a unit of account that had not been a coin since before Waterloo. - One Bruegel in this archive has a price in florins from 1594 and a price in francs from 1816. No published series connects the two, and nothing in the record supports an inflation adjustment between them. - A French price recorded in 1949 is in old francs, which were revalued at one hundred to one on 1 January 1960. A figure of 7,500,000 francs from that sale is 75,000 francs in the currency of eleven years later, and a table that does not know this will rank the sale roughly a hundred places too high. - Sometimes the consideration is not money at all. Aurel Stein recorded that he paid for fifty bundles of Chinese text rolls and five of Tibetan ones with four horse-shoes of silver, which he valued at about 500 rupees. ## A price is a number and a unit, and the unit is usually gone ## The guinea stopped being a coin in 1816 and went on setting records until 1970 ## Eight guineas, then five, at the same auction house eleven months apart ## The same object priced in florins and then in francs ## One object, three units, and a revaluation in the middle ## Sometimes the consideration is not money ## Where the unit survives but the arithmetic does not ## What to do with a price whose currency is gone The number in a price column is the half of the evidence that survives translation, and the half that carries the meaning is the unit beside it. Guineas, livres tournois, scudi, old francs and four ingots of silver are not awkward variants of a common measure; they are separate systems, and joining them into one series produces a chart that measures the person who made it. Record the unit, name whoever performed any conversion and on what date, and leave the column unbuilt where the sources will not support it. ## Questions **What is a guinea worth in pounds?** A guinea was fixed at twenty-one shillings from 1717, which is one pound and one shilling, or 1.05 pounds in decimal currency. So 39 guineas is 40 pounds and 19 shillings, and 2,200,000 guineas is 2,310,000 pounds. **Why were auction prices still quoted in guineas after the coin was abolished?** The guinea ceased regular production in 1813 and was demonetised in the Great Recoinage of 1816, but it survived as a unit of account. Professional fees and the prices of land, horses, art and other luxury goods were quoted in guineas until a couple of years after decimalisation in 1971, and London salerooms took bids in guineas into the 1970s. **Can you convert a historic art price into modern money?** Only with a stated method and a stated date, and often not at all. A conversion needs a defensible chain from the original unit to the target one, and for units such as the Roman scudo, the livre tournois or a weight of silver no such chain exists in the sources. Where an intermediate revaluation intervenes, as with the French new franc of 1960, an unadjusted figure can be wrong by two orders of magnitude. **What happened to the French franc in 1960?** France introduced the new franc on 1 January 1960 at a rate of one hundred old francs to one new franc. A price recorded in francs before that date is in old francs, so a sale reported at 7,500,000 francs in 1949 corresponds to 75,000 new francs, and a price table that carries the raw figure forward will rank the sale far too high. **How should a record state a price whose currency no longer exists?** Keep the figure in the words of the source, including shillings, centimes or guineas, and record the unit as its own field rather than converting inside the entry. Where a conversion exists in a source, attribute it to whoever made it and give the date, because a conversion made by the buyer or by contemporary reporting is testimony about that moment and not a property of the object. ## Sources - [1] Metropolitan Museum of Art, object record and published provenance for Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters, accession 19.164. Read in full for the 1594 sale for fl 1,400 to the Antwerp City Council as a gift for Archduke Ernst and for the Perignon sale of 11 March 1816, lot 1, for Fr 90.11 with the catalogue description quoted. - [2] Metropolitan Museum of Art, object record and published provenance for Georges de La Tour, The Fortune-Teller, accession 60.30. Read in full for the 1650 Bretagne inventory valuation of thirty livres, the 1879 valuation of 250 francs, and the 1949 sale by the heirs of General de Gastines to Wildenstein for Fr 7,500,000. - [3] National Gallery of Ireland, online collection, The Taking of Christ, loan number L.14702. Read for the 1602 commission from Ciriaco Mattei for 125 scudi and for the Dowell's Edinburgh sales of 25 June 1921, lot 30, at eight guineas, and 3 May 1922, lot 480, at five guineas. - [4] M. Aurel Stein, Ruins of Desert Cathay: Personal Narrative of Explorations in Central Asia and Westernmost China, volume II, 1912, chapter LXVI, pages 192-193. Full text read directly. The sentences about forty horse-shoes at about Rs.5000 and about the four horse-shoes of silver equal to about Rs.500 are quoted from Stein's own account. - [5] Wikipedia, Guinea (coin). Tertiary, used for the fixed value of twenty-one shillings from 1717, the end of regular production in 1813, the demonetisation in the Great Recoinage of 1816 and the survival of the guinea as a unit of account for professional fees and luxury goods until shortly after decimalisation in 1971. To be replaced with a Royal Mint source. - [6] Wikipedia, Portrait of Juan de Pareja. Tertiary, used for the 1801 Christie's sale at 39 guineas with the catalogue wording, and for the sale of 27 November 1970 at 2,200,000 guineas, reported as 2,310,000 pounds and converted to 5,544,000 dollars, bought by Alec Wildenstein for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Corroborated against the Metropolitan's own accession data for 1971.86. - [7] Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection API, object record 437869, Velazquez, Juan de Pareja, accession 1971.86, for the credit line, the accession year of 1971 and the medium and dimensions. - [8] Milo Keynes, The Portland Vase: Sir William Hamilton, Josiah Wedgwood and the Darwins, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London. Read for the 1784 purchase of the vase with three other antiquities for 1,800 guineas, and for lot 4155 on the final day of the Portland Museum sale producing 980 guineas, bought by an agent for the third Duke of Portland. - [9] Iconotheca, records for velazquez-juan-de-pareja, caravaggio-the-taking-of-christ, bruegel-the-harvesters, georges-de-la-tour-the-fortune-teller, dunhuang-diamond-sutra-british-library, the-portland-vase, fonthill-vase-national-museum-ireland and whistler-la-princesse-du-pays-de-la-porcelaine-peacock-room. The counts of 187 auction results, 111 records and sixteen distinct currency descriptions were computed across the 184 published records of this archive.