The most reproduced image in all of art history — a print that crossed the world from Edo to Paris and never looked like a print. Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji made a woodblock into the best-known gesture the market has.

A girl turning to look at you over her shoulder, the single pearl catching the light — 44 centimetres that became the portrait of the Northern Renaissance. The paucity of Vermeer's surviving œuvre is itself the market's whole argument.

Painted in the yellow house at Arles as a study in what a colour alone could say. The most expensive still life in history sold for the equivalent of nearly $100 million — and the series never stops setting private records.