He only creates eight paintings a year, he was born in Edinburgh but lives in the Caribbean, and he is little known outside the art world - but now Peter Doig has become Europe's most expensive living painter.

Doig's "masterpiece", White Canoe, has been sold for a record £5.7m at Sotheby's in London, a figure five times its predicted price, and means he now has the financial clout of other living painters such as David Hockney and Lucian Freud.

Doig, born in the Scottish capital in 1959, moved to Canada as a child and grew up there, before returning to the UK to train as an artist.

During the 1990s, when pure painting somewhat lost its lustre in the contemporary arts world, he remained engaged in the traditional form and now his work is "very commercial", according to Francis Outred, Sotherby's senior director.

On Tuesday night, furious telephone bidding led to the painting's rapid rise in price, and thunderous applause greeted the final successful bid for the painting, which had been expected to go for between £800,000 and £1.2m.

White Canoe, painted in 1991, was bought by an anonymous bidder, the auction house said.

Works by other greats including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein also went under the hammer during the contemporary art sale, raising £45.7m in total.

Oliver Barker, head of Sotheby's contemporary art department in London, said: "We are absolutely thrilled with the enormous, unprecedented success of tonight's sale, and especially with the world record price achieved for a work by Peter Doig - cementing his position among the finest painters of his generation.

ROCKING THE BOAT: Sotheby's auctioneer Tobias Meyer sells Peter Doig's painting The White Canoe for £5,732,000, about five times the estimate.

"What was most notable this evening was the depth and the strength of the bidding for top-quality works across a range of categories."

Doig is best known for his landscapes based on childhood scenes, and has now based himself in the tiny Caribbean state of Trinidad.

One of his last major sales was in June last year, when his canvas Iron Hill was auctioned for a then career record of £1,128,000, following an exhibition of his work by Charles Saatchi, the leading art collector.

In 2005 he was one of the artists exhibited The Triumph of Painting at the Saatchi Gallery in London.

Mr Outred said: "He has been the flag bearer for painting when it came back into fashion. A lot of artists who are now coming out are quoting him as a big influence.

"His works are very commercial objects, very traditional, very romantic and also incredibly complex."

He added: "The British claim he is British, the Canadians think he is Canadian, but he lives in Trinidad, and works in Germany: he's a truly modern day international artist.

"It was an amazing price and we were a little stunned. We think he is second only to Jasper Johns in terms of the price for a single painting by a living artist.

"I think the price was so high for a combination of reasons - he produces very little, he only paints around eight a year, so there is a lack of supply and when this masterpiece came on the market it attracted great interest.

"But I do not predict a great Doig market - it is unlikely to be repeated soon."

The music and film mogul, David Geffen, is alleged to have paid around £30m for Gray Number by Johns in a private deal in the late 1990s, and in 1998 the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought Johns' White Flag for an estimated £10m.

Mr Doig makes much use of photography, magazines, record covers and film stills in preparing his work, but has not ventured beyond paint on canvass.

"I'm not the type of person who would stop doing something because it was not in fashion," he once said.

"But there were always people interested in painting, even though people might not have been actually buying paintings. It is still something that people discussed and made."