Phillips (auctioneers)
auction house
Phillips, formerly known as Phillips the Auctioneers and briefly as Phillips de Pury, is a British auction house. It was founded in London in 1796, and has head offices in London and in New York City. In 2022 it was owned by the Mercury Group, a Russian luxury goods company.
History
Phillips was founded in 1796 by Harry Phillips, who had been a clerk to James Christie. The business held twelve auctions in its first year and soon became successful. Napoleon and Beau Brummell were among the early patrons. Harry Phillips died in 1840, and the business passed to his son William Augustus, who renamed it Phillips & Son; when his son-in-law Frederick Neale joined in 1882, the company became Phillips, Son & Neale. It was renamed Phillips in the 1970s; it was usually referred to as Phillips, the Auctioneers. In 1998, the company bought Selkirk, then a 168-year-old St. Louis auction house.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1627928. VIAF identifies the subject as 123198468. The Library of Congress control number is nr2005010140. 4 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1796, 2022, 1840 and 1882.
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This entry incorporates text from “Phillips (auctioneers)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.