A sprawling collection of art that once belonged to the late Microsoft co-founder and business magnate Paul Allen topped $1 billion on Wednesday night during the first of a two-part charity sale at Christie’s, shattering a six-month-old record of $922 million for biggest sale in auction history. “A sale like this does not reflect the art market at large, but the appetite for exceptional rare works,” the dealer Dominique Lévy told The New York Times. The total collection spans five centuries and includes 155 sculptures and paintings, 60 of which were put up for auction on Wednesday. The highest price fetched at the sale was the 1888 oil-on-canvas masterwork Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version) by Georges Seurat, which sold for $130 million to a bidder over the phone. The next two top-selling items were Paul Cézanne’s La montagne Sainte-Victoire and Vincent van Gogh’s Verger avec cypres, which garnered top bids of $120 million and $102 million, respectively. “The Seurat is probably an irreplaceable painting—and the van Gogh and the Cézanne,” said David Nash, once an art adviser to Allen, whose net worth hovered around $20.8 billion at the time of his death in 2018.