Peter Doig valuation
Snow, canoes, half-remembered landscapes, and the painter who moved to Trinidad.
Peter Doig was born in Edinburgh in 1959, raised in Trinidad and Canada, and studied in London at Wimbledon, Saint Martins and Chelsea.
What a work by Peter Doig is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Peter Doig was born in Edinburgh in 1959, raised in Trinidad and Canada, and studied in London at Wimbledon, Saint Martins and Chelsea. He came to attention in the early 1990s with large landscapes built from photographs, film stills, memory and postcards — a canoe on black water taken from Friday the 13th, a modernist Le Corbusier apartment block seen through winter trees, figures in snow. The surfaces are heavily worked, dripped and scraped. He moved to Trinidad in 2002, which changed the palette entirely, and later divided his time between there, New York and London.
The output is small — he paints slowly and has always destroyed work — and the 1990s canvases are the most sought part of it, with the Trinidad paintings a distinct and strong market of their own. Works on paper, including the studies and the drawings made for the Studiofilmclub posters in Port of Spain, are much more numerous and considerably more accessible. The print market is significant: etchings and screenprints published by Paragon and others in small editions. A litigation over a disputed attribution in 2016 made documentation from the artist unusually consequential.
Why the paperwork matters so much
In 2016 a federal judge in Chicago ruled that a desert landscape claimed to be an early Doig had been painted by another man, who signed his work Peter Doige. The owner had sued the artist to have the picture declared his, the case ran for three years, and a later award of sanctions against the owner and the dealer involved was upheld on appeal in 2025.
For owners, the practical point is documentation. A Doig with a clear line back to one of his galleries, an invoice or a letter from the artist is straightforward to place; one with only a story, however sincere, is very difficult, because the artist's own view of what he did and did not make carries decisive weight. Keep every document that came with a work, including correspondence, and keep it with the picture.
Trinidad, the Whitechapel prize and StudioFilmClub
Doig's family moved to Trinidad in 1962, where his father worked for a shipping and trading company, and to Canada in 1966. After boarding school in Scotland and a job on a gas rig in western Canada he studied at Wimbledon under Neil Stokoe, at Saint Martin's from 1980 to 1983 and at Chelsea, where he took his MA in 1990, working meanwhile as a dresser at English National Opera. The Whitechapel Artist Prize brought a solo show there in 1991 with Swamped, Iron Hill and The Architect's Home in the Ravine, which shows Eberhard Zeidler's modernist house in Toronto's Rosedale ravine. He won first prize at the John Moores with Blotter in 1993 and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1994.
The Concrete Cabin paintings show Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation at Briey-en-Forêt, which he helped to restore in 1991 with a group of architects and artists. Country-Rock (Wing Mirror), of 1999, is the Don Valley Parkway tunnel in Toronto with the rainbow someone painted over it in 1972. A residency with Chris Ofili took him back to Trinidad in 2000, and in 2003, with Che Lovelace, he started StudioFilmClub, a weekly film night in his studio for which he painted the posters. He taught at the Düsseldorf academy until 2017, was a Tate trustee from 1995 to 2000, and received the Praemium Imperiale for painting in 2025.
Best auction results
- Swamped $39.9m
- Oil on canvas, 1990 · New York · 9 November 2021
- Publicly reported
- The same painting had sold for $25.9m in New York in 2015.
- Rosedale $28.8m
- Oil on canvas, 1991 · New York · 18 May 2017
- Publicly reported
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
