Lost Robbies
Ever lost a $1 million gift?
On 17 July 2018, guests at Christie’s Art+Tech Summit: Exploring Blockchain in London were each given a gift bag with a scratch-off card redeemable for one frame of Robbie Barrat’s AI Generated Nude Portrait #7. Barrat, still a teenager, had trained a neural network on centuries of painted nudes. An early exploration in the use of GANs in fine art. Three months later, a portrait made with his model sold at Christie’s for $432,500, and the search for these frames began.
Most artworks were never redeemed, presumed lost. 259 of the 300 frames have not moved since. This is the market for the ones that were found.
- Found
- 41of 300
- Transactions
- 39on 32 frames
- Price
- 725ETH
For Sale
Lost Robbies Currently for Sale
| Frame | Ask (ETH) | Ask (USD) | Owner | Set (UTC) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #149 | 725 | $1,994,946 | satsmooncollection | |
| #204 | 1,421 | $3,909,242 | johnzettler_vault | |
| #101 | 5,555 | $15,285,416 | tokenangels | |
| #86 | 7,777 | $21,399,582 | ancetremer |
Onchain data currently unavailable
Latest used
Onchain data
- Snapshot
- Block
- 26,034,502
- ETH price
- $2,751.65
- Price from
- Coinbase Exchange
Data pulled daily at approximately 13:00 UTC
Transactions
Lost Robbies Sold Onchain
Onchain data currently unavailable
Historical used
Onchain & pricing data
- Snapshot
- Block
- 26,034,502
- ETH price
- At time of sale
- Price from
- Coinbase Exchange
Data pulled daily at approximately 13:00 UTC
Offers
Current Offers on Lost Robbies
| Frame | Offer (ETH) | Offer (USD) | Bidder | Set (UTC) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #41 | 1.8 | $4,953 | entropyfighter |
Onchain data currently unavailable
Latest used
Onchain data
- Snapshot
- Block
- 26,034,502
- ETH price
- $2,751.65
- Price from
- Coinbase Exchange
Data pulled daily at approximately 13:00 UTC
About
Robbie Barrat was still a teenager when he trained a generative adversarial network on a corpus of classical nude paintings and let it paint its own. The network never learned what a body is. It learned flesh tones, the weight of a reclining figure, the light of an academy studio, and assembled them into forms that fold and pool like wax. Barrat has described the series as a deliberate misreading: images with the qualities of the traditional nude and none of its structure. They were made in early 2018, years before image generators became a consumer product, and they remain some of the first works in which the machine’s error is the art.
For the summit, SuperRare and the writer Jason Bailey asked Barrat, the first artist to tokenize on the platform, for a work that could be split 300 ways. Each frame went onto a card with an Ethereum private key under a scratch-off panel, and into a gift bag. It was July 2018. Almost nobody in the room knew what they were holding, and most of the cards went out with the conference swag.
Three months later, on 25 October 2018, Christie’s New York sold Portrait of Edmond de Belamy for $432,500, more than forty times its estimate and the first AI-generated work at a major auction house. The Paris collective Obvious had produced it with open-source code Barrat had written and shared, by their own account barely modified. He was not credited in the sale and saw none of the money. Hyperallergic covered the argument that followed. It made his name, and it sent collectors looking for work that was unmistakably his.
In 2020 SuperRare’s Zack Yanger went through all 300 tokens, found a dozen claimed, and gave the rest their name. As frames turned up, prices followed: Artnet told the story of guests who kept their cards, and in “In Search of Lost Robbies” Kyle Waters traced every claim onchain for Right Click Save, as frame #64 sold at Sotheby’s for £630,000.
Barrat’s own view is cooler. The frames were a gift. “I wasn’t trying to create scarcity, I was trying to create abundance,” he told Bailey in a Right Click Save interview, where he also says the conversation has drifted from the work to the prices.
The moment itself is on film. Watch the summit’s panel on digital art, where Jason Bailey tells the room to find the cards in their gift bag and claim their artwork.
FAQ
What are the Lost Robbies?
The 300 frames of AI Generated Nude Portrait #7, made in 2018 by Robbie Barrat, the first artist to tokenize work on SuperRare. Each frame is its own one-of-one token. They were given away in gift bags at Christie's Art+Tech Summit: Exploring Blockchain, in London on 17 July 2018, each on a card with an Ethereum private key under a scratch-off panel. Most cards were thrown away, and the frames nobody claimed became the Lost Robbies. The name now covers the whole set.
Who is Robbie Barrat?
An American artist who, as a teenager, trained neural networks on art history and published the code. Born in Dublin in 1999 and raised in West Virginia, he taught a neural network to write rap lyrics while still at school, which led to work at NVIDIA on self-driving cars and to machine-learning research for drug discovery at Stanford, and later to art school in Saint-Nazaire, France. He treats AI as both a tool and a medium, using it to look again at art history, fashion and architecture: the nudes and landscapes of 2018, an imagined Balenciaga runway, Infinite Skulls with the French painter Ronan Barrot in 2019, and Acne Studios’ autumn/winter 2020 menswear collection. His work has been shown at Ars Electronica, Modemuseum Hasselt and Tate Modern, among others. More recent projects fold AI into a wider practice that takes in video games, generative plant forms and landscape, and he no longer sells work as NFTs. He is represented by l’Avant Galerie Vossen in Paris and works from a studio in West Virginia. His work is at robbiebarrat.net.
How many Lost Robbies are there?
300 were minted. 41 have been classified as “found”: their holder has transferred, listed or sold them at least once. 32 have sold. The other 259 have not moved since 2018.
What is a Lost Robbie worth?
As of 2026-09-22, the lowest asking price is 725 ETH ($1,994,946). The most recent sale was frame #221 at 225 ETH ($588,204) on 2025-02-08. The record is frame #184 at 300 ETH ($1,027,185) on 2021-10-05.
Where can I buy a Lost Robbie?
On SuperRare. Every frame on this page opens its SuperRare page, and the For Sale table lists every frame with a live asking price on the Ethereum smart contract.
Is this data exhaustive?
No. It covers the original SuperRare smart contract market, where every Lost Robbie was minted and where asking prices and offers are recorded on the token itself. Sales at other venues and private deals are excluded: frame #64’s £630,000 sale at Sotheby’s, for one, settled outside the contract and is not counted here.
Technical Details
Credit goes to Daniel Doubrovkine (dB.) who got here first. His 2021 technical blog post and the lost-robbies repository mapped frames to tokens and documented the ABI used here.
State
Once a day, 900 eth_calls at one pinned block read every frame’s owner, ask and standing offer from the SuperRare V1 contract: ownerOf, salePriceOfToken and currentBidDetailsOfToken for tokens 191–490 (frame n is token n + 190). The contract is the source of truth. Where SuperRare’s site disagrees, the contract wins.
History
Sales, and the dates of offers, come from SuperRare’s public GraphQL API. The date an ask was set comes from the chain: the transaction’s own SalePriceSet event has to match the contract to the wei. The index alone can’t be used for that, because it appears to pass amounts through a 64-bit float.
Prices
Coinbase Exchange’s ETH-USD ticker for asks and offers. For each sale, the close of the last completed one-minute candle before it, so today’s rate never revalues a 2018 trade. Amounts stay integer wei end to end (BigInt, never a float) and are rounded only on screen. Hover any price for the exact figure.
Agents
Take the data, don’t scrape the page. data.json is the full snapshot: exact wei, every sale and offer including the sub-1-ETH ones hidden above, the rate behind each dollar figure, and notes on reading it. data.md is this whole page as Markdown, with every row and ETH to six decimal places. Both are listed in llms.txt. Free to reuse and remix with credit (CC BY 4.0); the artworks are Barrat’s and their owners’, and are not part of that licence.
Subscribe
Found this useful? New essays and tools, straight to your inbox.