David Redden

In 2022, the J. Paul Getty Trust announced the acquisition of Redden´s auction related papers, including his Diary.

In 2017 Redden was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The physical decline has prevented Redden from completing the editing of his very extensive Private Diary of a Sotheby’s Auctioneer.  In 2019 his family created the David Redden ALS Fund to benefit research and treatment of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis at Columbia University.

In the 1990s Sotheby's and Christie's colluded on auction commissions and other business practices. Redden, who had no prior knowledge of the crime, was the first staff member at either Christie's or Sotheby's to speak out publicly decrying the criminal activities of the leadership of the two firms.

In 1978 Redden married Jeannette Andreasen, currently a Commissioner of the Palisades Interstate Park. They have two children, Stephen and Clare.

David Redden is a retired American auctioneer. He spent his entire career, from 1974 to 2016, with Sotheby's where he was a vice-chairman and was Sotheby's longest serving auctioneer. He has also chaired the boards of several American and British preservation and educational organizations.

Redden began his auction career as a catalog trainee at Sotheby's in 1974. He initially joined the company in order to learn more about his passion, collecting. By 1975 he was an auctioneer. Between his start at Sotheby's and the mid-1990s, Redden created numerous new auction categories for the company, including the specialty categories such as “space-memorabilia”, “baseball memorabilia, comic books, arcade machines, and computerized animation art.” Early in his career, in the late 1970s, he was appointed the director of PB-84, Sotheby's satellite auction house that focused on lower-priced items and unusual collecting categories. He later also became credited with developing the Internet strategy for Sotheby's in the late 1990s when he became chairman of Sothebys.com. Redden is best known as the manager and auctioneer for many of Sotheby's most celebrated live auctions. Redden served as a vice-chairman of Sotheby's from February 2000 to 2016, when he retired. He was also the Worldwide Chairman of Sotheby's Books and Manuscripts.

Redden was born in 1949 in Canton, China (now named Guangzhou), where his father served as an American consul for the US State Department. Nine months later he and his parents were withdrawn by the State Department as the Red Army advanced on Canton and transferred to Haifa, Israel. His father eventually became American consul general in London and Rome, where Redden spent much of his youth and education, receiving his high school diploma from St. Stephen's School in Rome. He later graduated from the Art History program at Wesleyan University, where he participated in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.

As an auctioneer Redden's sales included two first printings of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the Collections of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the Empress Josephine's copy of Redoute's Les Liliacees containing the original watercolors, the Estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis; a series of popular auctions for the Walt Disney Company; the largest, most complete, and best preserved Tyrannosaurus rex fossil ever recovered known as “Sue”; the most valuable coin ever sold, the 1933 Double Eagle; the Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in America; the world's most valuable stamp, the British Guiana 1¢ Magenta; Albert Einstein's manuscript on Special Relativity, a moon lander (still on the moon), three returned space capsules, and the first sale of luna rocks brought back from the Moon; the manuscript of the Magna Carta now in the National Archives; two of the greatest book sales of the 20th century, the library of H. Bradley Martin and the Garden Ltd. Collection; the Nelson Bunker Hunt sale of Ancient Coins, the Four Battleflags of the Revolution, the George Catlin Native American portraits collected in the 19th century by Benjamin O'Fallon, and the Bomberg Talmud from the Valmadonna Library. Several books have been written about his sales including Tyrannosaurus Sue by Steve Fiffer, Illegal Tender by David Tripp, and The One-Cent Magenta by James Barron.