master paintings specialist

Alexis Ashot is an independent consultant and art expert. He advises individual and institutional clients in the authentication, attribution, valuation and sale of works of art, in all categories but with a special emphasis on Old Master paintings. 

He read Art History under T.J. Clark and Andrew Stewart at UC Berkeley, graduating summa cum laude in 2006, with an Honors Thesis on self-portraiture in the art of Ingres and Delacroix. As a finalist for the University Medal, and Valedictorian for the History of Art Department, he received the highest honours awarded, respectively, by the University and by the Department in his graduating class, including the Departmental Citation and the Maybelle B. Toombs Award. 

An Open Scholar at University College London, he completed the MA in the History of Print, led by Tom Gretton and Antony Griffiths in The British Museum, co-curating the exhibition Tradition Aside: Slade Printmakers of the 1960s (Strang Print Room, May 2007).

In 2007 he joined the Department of Old Master and British Pictures at Christie’s, as a specialist. He is one of only a few Christie's alumni to have been a full Director by the age of thirty. During his tenure, he was involved in the sale of some of the most significant Old Masters to have changed hands in the early twenty-first century. As International Head of Private Sales, he held the record for the largest number of individual transactions of Old Masters, and for making a private sale in each of the major ‘flat art’ categories (Old Masters, Nineteenth Century Paintings, Victorian, Impressionist, Modern British and Contemporary). His interdisciplinary exhibition The Bad Shepherd (October 2014-January 2015) broke new ground, to favourable reviews in The Financial Times and Apollo Magazine. He was closely involved in the attribution and sale of the rediscovered Group portrait of Everhard Jabach and his family by Charles Le Brun to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2014; and of the ‘Armada Portrait’ of Queen Elizabeth I to the newly-inaugurated Royal Museums Greenwich in 2016, about which he wrote a book. His discovery of a long-lost, late self-portrait by Judith Leyster set a new world record in the same year. After more than a decade at Christie’s, he resigned his directorship in 2017. On his last day at Christie's, he opened the bidding, at $110m, for Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi, the most expensive work of art ever sold.