What Britain Searches For, and What Britain Can Actually Sell

Hundreds of thousands of people in the UK type an artist's name into Google every month. Almost none of them own anything they could sell. That gap — between the names that pull traffic and the names that pull consignments — is worth understanding before you pick up the phone.

The market as it stands. Christie's and Sotheby's both closed 2025 with sales up, helped by trophy lots and private deals. Jean-Michel Basquiat ended the year as the top-selling artist by auction revenue, at more than four times the next name. David Hockney placed third, lifted by the $44.3m paid for Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy at Christie's New York in November 2025. J.M.W. Turner placed fourth. That July, a Canaletto view of Venice made £31.9m in London — a record that helped push Old Masters up 24% year on year, to $182m. Christie's highest price of 2025 was Mark Rothko's No. 31 (Yellow Stripe), at $62.1m.

What Britain actually searches for. Banksy is the most-Googled artist in the country. In a YouGov survey of British favourites he came first again, ahead of Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, John Constable, Leonardo da Vinci, Turner, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, L.S. Lowry and Michelangelo.

Look closely and the problem shows: curiosity is not ownership. Van Gogh, Da Vinci and Michelangelo are not being sold out of British houses, and neither are Johannes Vermeer, Frida Kahlo, Gustav Klimt, Edvard Munch, Jackson Pollock, Sandro Botticelli, Raphael, Caravaggio, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, Georges Seurat, Piet Mondrian, Amedeo Modigliani, Alberto Giacometti, Cy Twombly, Annie Leibovitz or Cindy Sherman. Vast interest, almost no material. From a British seller's point of view Basquiat and Rothko belong here too — that money is in New York, and a domestic enquiry is far more often a poster than a picture.

The names that convert. Britain's most valuable search terms are quieter ones. Lowry is the clearest case: signed prints hang in thousands of homes whose owners have never had them looked at. The same goes for Jack Vettriano and Beryl Cook. Add the edition markets that genuinely move here — Dalí, Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Hockney, Yayoi Kusama, Tracey Emin, Roy Lichtenstein, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Bridget Riley, Antony Gormley, Grayson Perry, Julian Opie, Sir Peter Blake, Harland Miller, Gerhard Richter, Takashi Murakami, Alphonse Mucha and David Shepherd — and a working list appears.

British and sporting names carry weight out of all proportion to their global profile: Sir Alfred Munnings, Sir William Russell Flint, Sir Kyffin Williams, Eric Ravilious, Elisabeth Frink and Beatrix Potter. Older pictures still surface in country houses — Rembrandt van Rijn, Thomas Gainsborough, George Stubbs, Katsushika Hokusai — where attribution and scholarship, not fashion, set the price. Others sit in between, prints in circulation but originals long gone: Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, Egon Schiele, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Peter Doig, Anish Kapoor, Jeff Koons, Ai Weiwei and Alexander Calder.

Street art punches above its weight. Banksy aside, the category is almost entirely high-intent: Keith Haring, KAWS, Shepard Fairey, Invader, Stik, Mr Brainwash, D*Face, Ben Eine, Nick Walker, Pure Evil, My Dog Sighs, Blek le Rat and RETNA. Here the authentication paperwork is frequently half the value.

Photography is the least contested. The British demand is real and the specialist competition thin: David Bailey, Terry O'Neill and Slim Aarons above all, then Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, Don McCullin, Martin Parr, Robert Mapplethorpe, Vivian Maier and Helmut Newton. Print date, edition and printer decide everything.

The tier below. Lower search volume, better conversion — and often the most interesting pictures in the room. Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Howard Hodgkin, Patrick Heron, Terry Frost, Ben Nicholson, Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, John Piper, Graham Sutherland, Edward Seago, Archibald Thorburn, Rowland Hilder, Norman Cornish, Alexander Millar, Mackenzie Thorpe and Terence Cuneo. William Blake, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Morris and William Hogarth. Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, Albrecht Dürer, Titian, El Greco, Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Artemisia Gentileschi. Alfred Sisley, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt. Marc Quinn, Jenny Saville, Chris Ofili, Michael Craig-Martin, Sarah Lucas, Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana, Ed Ruscha, George Condo and Sean Scully. Josef Albers, Victor Vasarely and Hilma af Klint. Rankin, Norman Parkinson, Steve McCurry, Sebastião Salgado and Richard Avedon. JR, Vhils, Bambi, Dan Kitchener, Jamie Reid and Dolk.

What to do with this. If your artist is in the first group, enjoy the pictures and stop reading valuation guides. If the name appears anywhere after that, it is worth ten minutes of someone's attention — particularly for prints, editions and photographs, where date, edition size and paperwork routinely separate a few hundred pounds from a few thousand. The market rewarded quality and provenance throughout 2025. It has never been less forgiving of guesswork.