We can never know for sure what the most valuable museum exhibits in the world are.

So many of them are not for sale, and many have never been sold. 

Priceless is a word that gets thrown around a lot. 

But many of these items are beyond price.  

Barring catastrophe of one sort or another they will remain where they are, often in national collections owned by governments and their people. 

However, we have some estimates and some reported figures that can give us a tiny survey of the most valuable treasures in museum collections today. 

£1 billion-worth of Chinese ceramics

These are "moon flasks" made in the Qing period, probably around 1723–35. Image by Ismoon - CC BY-SA 3.0.

 

Late last year, an eye-catching figure hit the headlines. 

The British Museum had received a £1 billion donation. 

What was it? 

Ceramics. 

The Sir Percival David Foundation collection was already in the museum on loan but as of November 2024 they are the owners of Sir Percival’s life-long obsession. 

The collection was born in 1913, when Percival bought four pieces. 

With significant resources - he came from a banking family - the foundation’s collection is recognised as the best of its type outside the Chinese imperial palaces. It includes around a fifth of all the surviving Ru Ware in the world. This incredibly rare style dates to the 12th century and only the National Palace Museum in Taiwan has more. 

Sir Percival, who died in 1964, also had a world-leading collection of Chinese stamps. 

With 1,700 items in the donation, you could parcel them up at around £588,000 each - yes, that’s how big a billion is. 

The Mona Lisa is worth $850 million

The most famous smile in the world, it probably cost a king 4,000 crowns. 

 

At the end of his life, Leonardo Da Vinci became something of a political pawn. 

King Francis I of France - best known in the UK for his boasting competition with Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth of Gold - wanted to create a renowned court. 

To that end, he invited Leonardo to France, where the artist died. Though, his presence added lustre to Francis's cultural claims he was apparently genuinely close to the artist, whose greatest work he secured for his country. 

There is a little bit of a mystery about exactly how many versions of the portrait of Lisa del Giocondo he completed, but Francis bought the one that is now in the Louvre. 

He paid - possibly - 4,000 crowns for it. 

And that’s the last time it was sold (though it's been stolen). It has remained the property of the French monarchy or state ever since. 

King Francis I, contemporary and rival of Henry VIII of England, and big pal of Leonardo da Vinci. 

 

In 1962 it was valued at $100 million for insurance purposes. 

Today, that would probably mean a value of $850 million.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi for $450 million

Salvator Mundi may yet prove to have more answers to some mysterious questions.

 

We are in a new age of museums as the world’s economic and geopolitical axes tilt. 

That’s how we see a branch of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, funded by the nation’s culture ministry, tabling the winning bid in a $450 million auction in 2017. 

The prize was a rediscovered Leonardo, which was sold as the only accepted of 20 surviving works by the master not yet in a museum collection. 

And now it is. 

Or is it? 

There are a number of controversies around Salvator Mundi. 

It’s obviously a very fine painting. But is it really by Leonardo? And if it is, is all of it by Leonardo? 

It was sold for just over $1,000 in 2005, when it was thought to be "after Leonardo". It took major restoration work and lots of research to firm up the attribution to its current extent. 

And who really bought it? 

While it was initially bought by Prince Badr bin Abdullah Al Saud, from Abu Dhabi, it has ended up in the collection of Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and a proposed museum that may exhibit it has yet to be completed. 

£350 million for the Hope Diamond 

It's a test of a supposedly cursed stone's luck to send it in this package by regular post.

 

The finest precious stones often stay in private hands, and the story of the donation of the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian Institutions in Washington is extraordinary. 

It arrived by registered mail in a brown-paper-wrapped box. 

The sender was jeweller, Harry Winston, who had bought it from the McLean family, mining magnates who owned it. 

Evelyn Walsh McLean modelling a rather lovely gift from her husband. 

 

The ownership trail of the amazing 45.52 carats blue stone is long and twisting, and adds credibility to the supposed curse on the gem. 

It was discovered in India, and bought by a French dealer, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in 1666. 

It has been sold time and time again, including probably by the British Royal Familiy, with a steadily increasing set of superlative price tags. 

The McLeans bought it from Pierre Cartier for $300,000, a fee probably kept artificially low because of the widely believed stories of bad luck attaching to the stone. 

It’s last valuation has it at $350 million. 

The £123 million Hotung Gift 

Two jade bowls from the Hotung collection.

 

In 2022, Joseph Hotung bequeathed the British Museum a very large collection of Chinese jade, porcelain and metalwork. 

It’s value? 

£123 million. 

Mr Hotung died in 2021, leaving a collection built around 246 jades that covered every major Chinese dynasty. 

Much of the collection was already on display as a loan, and Hotung had been a board member at the Museum. 

He was born in Hong Kong into a wealthy and prominent Eurasian family, whose name is commemorated everywhere in the city. 

The Hong Kong Hotel was part owned by Mr Hotung's family along with docks, exchanges and more. 

 

He collected widely, but Chinese art was his passion.

An auction of much of the rest of his collection, including very fine European art collections, held in 2022 realised over £100 million. 

The priceless Waddesdon Bequest

The Holy Thorn Reliquary was believed to hold a remnant of the biblical Crown of Thorns.

 

Another collection in the British museum that is really impossible to value. 

However, we do know that a single item, the Holy Thorn Reliquary, cost more than half of the annual expenditure of the entire French state when it was bought in 1239. 

At that stage, its buyer believed it to hold a thorn from the Crown of Thorns from Jesus’ crucifixion.

Even without that belief it is an extraordinary item and impossible to value without putting it up for sale.  

The 300 items in the bequest were given by to the Museum in 1898 by Baron Ferdinand Rothschild.

Baron Ferdinand Rothschild built a mock French chateau in Waddesdon Buckinghamshire for weekend parties and to house his collections. Image courtesy of The National Trust. 

 

The Rothschild family are the subject of some extremely dangerous antisemitic conspiracy theories. And they were also genuinely rich and, to the extent that any rich family is, powerful European bankers. 

Much of the Waddesdon Bequest was assembled relatively cheaply in the 19th century. The medieval and renaissance pieces brought together by Rothschild (some he was given in banking transactions) were simply unfashionable, and might easily have been melted down for their bullion value. 

The home in which they were housed cost £1.5 million to build in the 1870s. The Bequest was valued at £400,000 in 1898 when it was given to the museum. The Bank of England inflation calculator churns out a figure of about £45 million now, but really, it genuinely is priceless today.  

You could go and see it now, still presented as a collection in a separate room as specified in its 19th-century gifting. 

Collecting with museums and for museums

As the world's largest dealer in rare collectibles, Paul Fraser Collectibles partners with major museums around the world to find the best homes for some of the world's rarest and most precious items. 

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