How much to purchase all Monet paintings?

As you may know, one of the “Haystack” series of Claude Monet sold this week at Sotheby's for $110 million. This is the highest price to date for a Monet. Cool price, huh?

I decided to estimate the total value of Monet’s corpus of work. Here's how. First, there are about 2500 paintings and drawings out there. (Greater numbers are estimated and some are certainly lost.) The cheapest one I could find was sold recently for $10,000. I used two mathematical models for the total cost, one an exponential model, and the other a power model.

Anyway, for these models, I estimate the total value of Monet’s work to be between $530 and $540 million. Both models exhibit a very high drop off rate in pricing. For example, the fourth most expensive Monet is estimated to cost about $25 million, with the estimated average cost of the four to be about $45 million. This has much to do with the model, but probably as much due to the available clientele with such deep pockets.

If we had more data, we could apply standard nonlinear regression methods. But it is interesting to note the value of Monet’s output, and that of many other great artists exceed by far the values of fairly substantial corporations.

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