Banksy made his name as a guerrilla graffiti artist by smuggling a dead rat into the Natural History Museum and mounting it as an exhibit in a glass-fronted box.

Yesterday he enhanced his reputation in a more conventional way when one of his works sold for a record auction price at Sotheby’s in London.

An anonymous collector paid £102,000 for Bombing Middle England, made from acrylic and spray-paint on canvas. The buyer ignored the estimate of £30,000 to £50,000 and the artist’s previous record of £57,600.

The image, which depicts a group of bowls players rolling bombs across a lawn, is typical of Banksy’s antiwar, anticapitalist and anti-Establishment stance.

Another of his works, Balloon Girl, a spray-painted stencil on canvas, went for £37,200, five times the low estimate.

Banksy, from Bristol, is perhaps best known for the politicised stencils that he creates on public buildings. The artist, who seems to treat celebrity with disdain, does have a celebrity following: Brad Pitt and An-gelina Jolie are said to have paid £200,000 for one of his works. Not surprisingly, he declined to comment yesterday on the prices paid for his work.

Banksy was one of 11 contemporary artists whose records were broken. There were some dazzling prices at the evening sale at Sotheby’s, witnessed by what seemed to be a record number of dealers and onlook-ers — more than at the Impressionist sales this week — with the biggest buyers again bidding by telephone.

White Canoe, a monumental painting by the Scottish artist Peter Doig topped £5.73 million, to gasps and applause. It was always expected to do well, as he is a sought-after artist, but there were murmurs of disbelief when bidding reached £3.2 million. After all, his previous record was £1.12 million and this was a work he completed just after leaving Chelsea School of Art in the early 1990s.

What seemed like a good two minutes of silence passed before the figures started going up in slow motion as two collectors realised just how much they wanted it.

It was among 13 works that changed hands for more than £1 million. The auctioneer’s upper estimate of £700,000 for the view of Camden Theatre in the Rain by Frank Auerbach bore no relation to what was paid. It went for £1.92 million, exceeding the previous modest record of £456,000.

Records kept tumbling: Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild of 1991, a powerful abstract in blood red, made £2.82 million, Piero Manzoni’s abstract Achrome — by an artist whose best-known work, a tin of excrement, is owned by the Tate — made £1.7 million, and Joseph Beuys’s Olivestone— a block of sandstone — went for £389,600.

The evening sale alone totalled £45.76 million.

Guerrilla art

- His identity has never been revealed officially

- He made his name with a series of secretive and subversive stunts

- He placed a life-size replica of a Guantanamo Bay detainee in Disneyland

- In 2005, he planted a cave painting of a man pushing a shopping trolley at the British Museum and claimed that it went unnoticed for three days

- A piece of Banksy’s graffiti art — a stencilled image of a naked man hanging on to a window ledge — has been allowed to remain on a building in his home city of Bristol after the public voiced support

Source: Times database

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