For reasons I'm not entirely sure about (it may be something to do with the price being more verifiable, and/or auction prices being a better gauge of true value than a private sale), it's important to distinguish between the highest price ever paid for a painting and the highest price paid at auction.
Salvator Mundi was sold at auction, and so was Les Femmes d'Alger. But while the former commanded what is currently the highest price ever paid for a painting, the latter was only the highest price ever paid at auction. Before Salvator Mundi, the most expensive painting ever was probably (according to Wikipedia) Interchange by Willem de Kooning. Painted in 1955, this was sold in 2015 for a price of around $300 million. The seller was the philanthropic foundation established by David Geffen, the founder of Asylum Records; the buyer was the American financier and philanthropist Kenneth C. Griffin.
According to the same Wikipedia page, five other paintings have been sold privately for higher prices than that paid for Les Femmes d'Alger. One of them (The Card Players, by Cezanne) was sold in 2011 for an unknown price that may (notes Wikipedia) have come very close to the $300 million paid for Interchange.
Les Femmes d'Alger (The Women of Algiers) was the title of a series of fifteen paintings, and numerous drawings, created by Picasso in 1954–5. Picasso painted several series in tribute to artists that he admired; this one was inspired by Eugène Delacroix's The Women of Algiers in their Apartment (1834).
The entire series was bought in 1956 by the noted American collectors Victor and Sally Ganz, for $212,500 (equivalent to $1.9 million in 2017). The Ganzes later sold ten of the paintings to the Saidenberg Gallery in New York, keeping versions 'C', 'H', 'K', 'M' and 'O'.
Version 'O', the final painting in the series, was sold for $31.9 million in November 1997, following the death of Sally Ganz, at Christie's in New York. (Victor Ganz died in 1987.) Three other versions in the series owned by the Ganz family were also auctioned at the same time. Version 'O' was bought by a London–based Saudi Arabian collector, who put it up for auction in 2015. This time the buyer was the former Qatari prime minister, Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani.
Salvator Mundi is one of fewer than twenty known works by Leonardo da Vinci, and was the only one to remain in a private collection. In November 2017 it was sold at auction by Christie's in New York to a Saudi Arabian entrepreneur, on behalf of the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism, to be displayed at the Louvre's Abu Dhabi gallery.
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