Monet at auction IIA

 

 Also see Monet at Auction and Monet at Auction II

Claude Monet, Meules. Oil on canvas. Executed in 1890, signed and dated by the artist in 1891. Estimate in excess of $55 million.

Sotheby’s announced that an enduring symbol of Impressionism from Claude Monet’s iconic Haystacks series will lead an important private collection of eight Impressionist masterworks on offer in our Evening Sale of Impressionist & Modern Art on 14 May in New York.

Of the 25 canvases that the artist created in the early 1890s, Meules from 1890 is one of only four works from this series to come to auction this century and one of only eight remaining in private hands. The other 17 examples reside in the distinguished collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Musée d’Orsay, Paris and, perhaps most notably, six in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Meules is further distinguished by its illustrious provenance, having been acquired by wealthy Chicago socialites and fervent collectors of Impressionist works, Mr. and Mrs. Potter Palmer, directly from the artist’s dealer in the 1890s.Having remained in the same private collection since it was acquired by the present owners at auction in 1986, the radiant canvas will be offered this May with an estimate in excess of $55 million.

Meules belongs to a group of eight outstanding works by Impressionist masters on offer this May from the same important private collection, including defining examples by Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Signac, Alfred Sisley and Édouard Vuillard. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the collection will significantly benefit two world-renowned, not-for-profit institutions in the fields of science and music.

This exquisite group of works will debut in a public exhibition beginning 3 May in Sotheby’s newly reimagined and expanded York Avenue galleries. This exhibition marks the first public viewing of Meules in over three decades.

August Uribe, Head of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Department in New York, commented: “It is a privilege to present one of Claude Monet’s defining Impressionist paintings in our Evening Sale this May. One of the most recognizable images in art history, Monet’s Haystacks series has long served as an inspiration to countless artists since its creation in the early 1890s, and continues to inspire anyone who has viewed one of these canvases first hand. Prior to 2016, a Haystack had not been presented to collectors since Sotheby’s London offered a work from the series in June 2001, nearly 20 years ago. In addition, the seven pictures that round out this collection are exceptional in their own right, and the group as a whole is among the finest assemblages of Impressionist works that we have seen in recent years. Anytime a work, such as Meules, that has been so formative in the canon of art history comes to auction there is a palpable energy that ricochets through the market. It is with this immense enthusiasm that we look forward to presenting this wonderful group to collectors worldwide this May.”

Brooke Lampley, Vice Chairman of Sotheby’s Fine Art Division, said: “It was in 1890 with the Haystacks that Monet first began an intrepid exploration of the varying effects of light and atmosphere on a single subject over the course of time. It is these “series” pictures of haystacks, the Rouen Cathedral, and water lilies in Giverny that would eventually come to define his immense contribution to not only Impressionism, but also Abstraction and 20th century art. Now the most celebrated works of Monet's oeuvre, the series pictures are sought after by Impressionist and Contemporary collectors alike. It is a thrill to be offering a Meule that is not only distinguished among those remaining in private hands, but also easily ranks among the best in the entire series. This is a painting that showcases Claude Monet as an unparalleled landscape painter, and a radically innovative conceptual artist who would influence generations of artists to come.”

CLAUDE MONET’S MEULES
Painted at the height of Claude Monet’s artistic powers, Meules stands as a seminal work of Impressionism.

Executed in 1890 and signed and dated by the artist in 1891, Meules was acquired in the early 1890s by Mr. and Mrs. Potter Palmer directly from the artist’s dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel. Bertha Palmer, a celebrated Chicago socialite and the wife of well-known businessman Potter Palmer, amassed an unrivaled collection of Impressionist works, many of which are now the bedrock of the Art Institute of Chicago’s renowned Impressionist collection. Palmer acquired a large portion of the collection between 1891 and 1892 while traveling abroad to help organize the World’s Columbian Exposition, where she served as President of the Board of Lady Managers and advocated for women’s equality. The Palmers were introduced to Durand-Ruel in 1889 through curator Sarah Tyson Hallowell, who later introduced them to the artist Mary Cassatt. It is estimated that Mrs. Palmer owned nearly 90 works by Monet over the course of her life, and built a sprawling picture gallery, complete with red velvet walls, in her home to display her collection of Romantic, Barbizon and Impressionist works. Palmer owned six of Monet’s grainstack canvases, all purchased following the artist’s exhibition at Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1891. While the Palmers sold many of the pictures shortly after their acquisition, the present work remained in Mrs. Palmer’s personal collection until her death in May 1918 and with her heirs for decades after.

Monet began working on the group of paintings that are almost universally known as Haystacks as early as 1884, depicting stacks that were subsumed into a wider environment. However, the major series of majestic canvases depicting grainstacks, with a focus on the evanescent effects of light, were completed between 1889 and 1891. The stacks upon which Monet lavished so much of his energy and vision during those years were actually the stores for wheat and grain, and not for hay as is the popular misconception.

The stacks in the present composition are distinguished from other depictions in the series by the diagonal swaths of light between the forms. Voluminous, full structures, the stacks suggest the great fertility and bountifulness of the Normandy landscape, their surfaces gilded and burnished with the light of the sun, imparting a sense of well-being, vitality and the harmony of nature throughout the canvas. In choosing these powerful grainstacks as his subject, Monet continued a long tradition of depicting the French countryside and its abundant riches as seen in the paintings of Jean-François Millet and the Barbizon school. However, Monet updates this tradition to striking effect. His grainstacks series contains virtually no anecdotal detail: no laborers, no figures walking through the fields or birds flying in the sky. The artist pares down his vision to focus solely on the grainstacks themselves, on the play of light on them, on the sky and the horizon. In its warmth and generosity of vision, in its elevation of the humble grainstack to an emblem of Impressionism, and in its emphasis on form and light, Meules is an undisputed masterpiece of Monet’s oeuvre and one of art history’s most evocative images.

Claude Monet, Le Palais Ducal, oil on canvas, 1908 (est. £20,000,000-30,000,000)

Helena Newman, Worldwide Head of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Department & Chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, said:

‘This spellbinding painting is a true masterpiece and among the very greatest Monet painted during his first and only encounter with Venice. Having remained in the same family collection since 1925, it presents a rare opportunity for collectors from all over the world to acquire a painting of this quality that is completely fresh to the market.’ Claude Monet arrived in Venice on 1 October 1908 – and, taken aback by the splendour of what he saw, the artist declared the city‘too beautiful to paint’. 

Enchanted by the city, Monet painted just under forty  canvases  during  the  course  of  his  three  month  stay, the greater  part  of  which  adorn  the  walls  of  museums  across  the  globe.  This  spectacular  painting  depicts  the  historic  Gothic façade of the Doge’s palace, and it belongs to a celebrated group of three works painted from the vantage of a boat moored along the canal, one of which is held in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum in New York.


Almost  a  century  later,  this  painting  will  now  appear  at  auction  for  the  first  time,  with  an  estimate of £20,000,000 – 30,000,000, as part of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on 26 February 2018.  The painting was exhibited earlier this year – its first public appearance in almost four decades – alongside its counterpart from the Brooklyn Museum,  in a room dedicated to the Venice series in  the National  Gallery  in London’s  acclaimed  Monet  and  Architecture  show,  which  toured through Monet’s ground-breaking depictions of the modern world in which he lived. 

The composition  is  harmoniously  divided  between  the  palace’s brick exterior,  and  its  reflection in  the  water.  Monet  animates  the  lagoon  with  wonderfully  dappled  brushstrokes  whilst  also  bringing to life the façade of the building, which is softly diffused by light. The unique lacustrine quality  of  Venice and  its  architectural  heritage  allowed Monet  to  explore  more  abstract  compositions,  accentuating  the  interplay  between  the  rhythms  of  the  architecture  and  the  expanse  of  water.  

 In  Venice,  Monet  turned  to  his  artistic  forbears  JMW  Turner  and  James Abbott  McNeill  Whistler,  for  both  of  whom  the  city  had  held  a  special  importance.  Turner  presented  a  Venice  transfigured  by  light,  and  viewing  their  poetic  paintings  side  by  side,  Henri  Matisse  once  remarked  that  ‘it  seemed  to  [him]  that  Turner  must  have  been  the  link  between  the  academic  tradition  and  impressionism’.  Unapologetically  modern  in  its  outlook  and  in the way  that  it  is  painted,   the  work  is  not  a  topographical  view  so  much  as  it  is  an  evocation  of  atmosphere. Venice proved the perfect subject for Monet to explore his apotheosis of painting.

 

Leading the collection is Claude Monet’s L’escalier à Vétheuil, 1881 ($12-18 million) – pictured left. With its extraordinary profusion of flowers and foliage, this sun-drenched canvas captures the splendor of high summer in Monet’s garden at Vétheuil, a rural hamlet that the artist called home from 1878 until 1881. The staircase at the center of the canvas acts as the compositional anchor for a series of four closely related views of the house and garden, which Monet created during the height of the summer sunshine.

The present L’escalier à Vétheuil was most likely the first in the series to be created, its close-up view of the unpopulated steps suggesting that the artist set his easel on the upper terrace to capture the view. The decorative quality of the Vétheuil garden scenes very clearly appealed to the contemporary market. Monet sold all three of the plein air canvases within a year or two of their execution, retaining only the National Gallery studio variant for himself. The first owner of the present version was the Pennsylvania Railroad tycoon Alexander Cassatt, the brother of Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt and a pioneering American collector of the New Painting; the canvas entered his collection around 1883, when Monet’s work was still little known across the Atlantic. In the spring of the same year, Monet and his extended family moved downriver to Giverny, where the artist’s garden as a subject for modern painting would eventually reach its apogee. L’escalier à Vétheuil is the last of the four from the series remaining in private hands: one version hangs in the National Gallery in Washington; D.C., another is in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena; and the third was bequeathed by the legendary California businessman, philanthropist and collector, A. Jerrold Perenchio, to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2014.

On 11 November, Le bassin aux nymphéas  will be offered in the Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale  at Christie’s in New York.

 

Claude Monet's (1840-1926), Le bassin aux nymphéas, 1917-19. Oil on canvas. 39 3/4 x 79 in (100.7 x 200.8 cm) Estimate: $30,000,000-50,000,000.

On 24 June 2008  Le Bassin Aux Nymphéas, sold for almost £41 million at Christie's in London, almost double the estimate of £18 to £24 million.

I do not have long to live, and I must dedicate all my time to painting,’ wrote Claude Monet in a 1918 letter to the Parisian art dealer, Georges Bernheim. ‘I don’t want to believe that I would ever be obliged to leave Giverny; I’d rather die here in the middle of what I have done.’

Monet would survive these words by a number of years, but they reflect his precarious state of mind in the summer when he was working on Le Bassin aux nymphéas. He was approaching 80 — well beyond the life expectancy for men of his generation — and suffering increasingly with cataracts in both eyes. The First World War was also entering its final phase, the Germans recently having launched their Ludendorff Offensive on the Western Front: a last-ditch effort at victory before newly-arriving US troops could be fully deployed on the Allied side.

The Germans’ advance was swift and effective, with Paris now within reach of their long-range guns. As, just about, was the village of Giverny, located slightly to the west of the French capital and a place Monet had called home since 1883.

Monet was an avid gardener, and much of his time at Giverny was spent in his sizeable garden. Peonies and red geraniums jostled for attention with pansies and yellow roses. His most famous horticultural feat, though, was creating a water garden, complete with a lily-covered pond, which, over the decades, he’d paint around 250 times.

By the turn of the 20th century, the pond became the almost-exclusive subject of Monet’s art, inspiring an outpouring of creativity that, for many, marks the summit of his career. A 1909 exhibition of 48 of his water-lily paintings, at Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris, left art critics purring at how close to abstraction they looked. ‘His vision is increasingly limiting itself to the minimum of tangible realities, in order… to magnify the impression of the imponderable,’ wrote Jean Morgan in daily newspaper, Le Gaulois.

Monet wasn’t an artist to rest on his laurels or repeat past successes, however, and in 1918 he ordered a set of 20 large canvases in elongated, horizontal format (roughly a metre high by more than two metres wide). He duly began work on a new, compositionally connected group of paintings, where lily pads are clustered towards the lateral edges and a burst of sunlight makes its way in a vertical band down the centre, before spilling out into a broad pool at the bottom.

He’d complete 14 works of this type, Le Bassin aux nymphéas  among them. In that particular painting, he unified the scene’s elements by adopting a diaphanous veil of colour all over, laid down with a light, transparent touch.

‘Monet saw the canvases as forerunners... of his late, water-lily Grandes Décorations’ — Paul Hayes Tucker, curator

For Paul Hayes Tucker, the curator of a number of exhibitions on the French master, including Monet in the 20th Century  at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Royal Academy of Arts, London, in the late 1990s, ‘this [suite of] canvases has a physical and emotional expansiveness’ that earlier water-lily paintings lacked.

Work on them proceeded rapidly, and in August 1918 Monet invited the dealer René Gimpel to Giverny for a private viewing. An enthused Gimpel remarked that ‘it was as though [he] were present at one of the first hours of the birth of the world.’ He saw neither horizon nor shore, being thrown into the midst of a seemingly limitless scene ‘without beginning or end.’

Twelve of the 14 paintings are extant today, the most recent example to appear on the market — another Le Bassin aux nymphéas — fetching £40.9 million ($80.4 million) at auction in 2008, which at the time represented a new world auction record for the artist.

According to Tucker, there’s a final reason the 14 works are important: the likelihood that ‘Monet saw the canvases as forerunners... of his late, water-lily Grandes Décorations’. Monet completed this ensemble of 22 mural-sized paintings shortly before his death in 1926 and donated them to the French state. Totalling more than 90 metres in length, they boast the same elongated, horizontal format as Le Bassin aux nymphéas (albeit on a larger scale) and are displayed, as per the artist’s wishes, like a panoramic frieze, wrapped around a circular room.

 

Claude Monet (1840-1926), La Gare Saint-Lazare, Vue extérieure, 1877. Oil on canvas. Estimate on request. Offered in the Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale on 20 June at Christie’s in London ‘This superb painting describes Monet at his Impressionist best, capturing in quick, bold brushstrokes the energy of metropolitan Paris as described by the sound and fury of the steam trains as they left the Gare Saint-Lazare,’ says Christie’s Global President Jussi Pylkkänen. In the Gare Saint-Lazare  series Monet depicted the station from a variety of different positions, at different times of day and in different atmospheric conditions — marking the first occasion on which the artist committed himself to the pursuit of a single subject through a sequence of variations. This would come to be one of the defining aspects of Monet’s practice for the rest of his career. In April 1877, Monet included several of the Gare Saint-Lazare  canvases in the Third Impressionist Exhibition. Before he executed La Gare Saint-Lazare, Vue extérieure, Monet had been living and working in Argenteuil, just outside Paris. Based in rural Montgeron in the summer of 1876, he returned to the capital in the new year eager to capture the bustling urban landscape. Monet’s friend, the artist Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894), rented him a small ground-floor apartment near the station; just three months later, the series was complete. Of the 12 Gare Saint-Lazare paintings, today only three remain in private hands. The remaining nine are in public institutions, including the Fogg Museum, Massachussetts; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery, London; the Musée Marmottan, Paris; and the Musée d’Orsay. Three of these museum works are currently included in Monet & Architecture, a pioneering show at London’s National Gallery which examines the central role architecture played in many of the artist’s compositions.

and two masterpieces by Claude Monet:  



Prairie à Giverny (1885, estimate: £7,000,000 - 10,000,000) 

 

and Pivoines (Peonies) (1887, estimate: £3,500,000 - 5,500,000). 



The Triton Collection Foundation Claude Monet’s Vétheuil (1879, estimate: £4,000,000 - 6,000,000 ) is being offered from the Triton Collection Foundation , whose extensive loan programme to over seventy museums globally has made public access a top priority . It dates from one of the most crucial turning points of Monet’s career , where Monet embraced the landscape in its purest form, captu ring the ephemeral effects of light and atmosphere to create what many consider to be some of the finest works of his career.

Monet’s beloved garden of Giverny was a source of unending inspiration. Nymphéas en fleur is among the largest scale, most brilliantly colored, and vigorously worked canvases that the artist executed – a glorious tribute to the natural world (estimate in the region of $35 million). This work belongs to a group of paintings Monet painted in a burst of untrammeled creativity between 1914 and 1917, as Europe plunged into the chaos of war. Upon the recommendation of Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, Peggy and David Rockefeller visited the Parisian dealer Katia Granoff and purchased the present painting in 1956. “One, which was almost certainly painted in the late afternoon and in which the water is a dark purple and the lilies stand out a glowing white, we bought immediately,” David Rockefeller recalled in Memoirs.

MPRESSIONIST & MODERN ART EVENING SALE 

Auction 14 November 2017 

Works from the Mellon Family Collection are led by 

 

Claude Monet’s Champ d’iris à Giverny, painted in 1887 during a period of respite from the artist’s extensive travels in Holland, Brittany and, finally, his newly- established permanent studio at Giverny (estimate $3/5 million) . The idyllic , pastoral subject matter of this work encapsulates the central focus of Monet’s oeuvre toward the end of the 19 th century, when he divorced himself from painting urban scenes of Paris and devoted himself fully to his beloved countryside in Giverny. 

The present work was acquired by the Mellons in 1953 and has remained in the family’s collection since . 

CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926)
Le Rio de la Salute,
oil on canvas, 32 x 25 in. Painted in 1908. Estimate: $7,000,000-10,000,000 

MONET: FROM GIVERNY TO VÉTHEUIL

 
The selection of Impressionist pictures on offer this May are led by Claude Monet’s Le Bassin aux nymphéas, a powerful testament to the artist’s enduring creativity in his mature years (estimate $14/18 million). Monet’s paintings of his water lily pond at Giverny rank among the most celebrated Impressionist works. Painted circa 1917-20, Le Bassin aux nymphéas captures the famous pond that served as a boundless source of inspiration, providing the major themes that dominated his final decades. The enduring impact of these late paintings is evident in works of abstraction by artists including Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell and Gerhard Richter.

Monet’s Vétheuil is a stunning depiction of the artist’s hometown (estimate $4/6 million). This picturesque location was the site of some of Monet’s most successful Impressionist landscapes during this period, and continued to fascinate him well into his late career. Painted in 1880, the work has descended within the same family collection since 1914.

Painted in the immediate aftermath of the ground-breaking first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, Claude Monet’s Les Bords de la Seine au Petit-Gennevilliers (1874, estimate: £2,000,000-3,000,000) focuses on the idyllic, picturesque Parisian suburb of Petit-Gennevilliers, which sat on the opposite bank of the Seine to the artist’s adopted home of Argenteuil. Working alongside Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Édouard Manet, Monet produced a string of plein-air masterpieces over the course of this summer, inspired by the area’s timeless beauty, charming historical character, and lively nautical traffic that filled this stretch of the Seine. Focusing on the play of light, and the fleeting, ephemeral movement of the sky and river, the present composition is filled with swift, loose brushstrokes that convey a sense of the speed with which the artist rendered the scene, as he quickly translated the landscape as he saw it before him directly onto his canvas.

Le bassin aux nymphéas by Claude Monet (1840-1926) (estimate: $25,000,000-35,000,000) leads the sale and belongs to the artist’s most popular and arguably influential series, which lent inspriation to generations of subsequent artists in the twentieth century. This work is part of a sequence of 14 paintings that Monet most likely began in the spring or summer of 1918 and finished by late 1919, when he dated and sold the canvas to the Impressionist dealer Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in 1919. It was then bought by Henri Canonne, a Parisian pharmaceutical tycoon and major collector of Impressionism in 1928. Canonne owned more than forty paintings by Monet, including seventeen canvases from the Nymphéas series. The painting has been in the present collection for 20 years.

Monet’s Au Petit-Gennevilliers (estimate: $12,000,000-18,000,000), belongs to another celebrated series from Monet’s early career, when he painted various scenes of Argenteuil in 1874. The site itself is widely linked with the birth of Impressionist painting and provided endless inspiration for Monet and the other impressionists at that time. This painting will be on the market for the first time since 1899. It was purchased by the famed American collector Henry Osborne Havemeyer in 1901 and has remained in the family ever since.

Claude Monet’s Nymphéas are amongst the most iconic and celebrated Impressionist paintings. The profound impact these pictures have made on the evolution of Modern Art marks this series as Monet’s greatest achievement. The famous lily pond in his garden at Giverny provided the subject matter for most of his major late works. These spectacular canvases document the changes in his style and his constant pictorial innovations as he continued to paint this theme until his death in 1926. The present work dates from circa 1908 when he painted what are arguably the finest examples from the series. The canvas here is an extraordinary example of the artist's virtuosity as a colorist. The surface texture is rich with detail, particularly in the passages where the blossoms float atop the water. This distinction between reflection and surface, water and flora, and the general clarity of the scene are particularly striking in Monet's canvas here, and evidence its distinction as one of the most technically sophisticated of the entire series. 

 Mr. Koch’s Nymphéas was once in the prestigious Cannone Collection, formed by the Parisian pharmacist and industrialist Henri Canonne, where it remained with his family for over seven decades. Sotheby’s has sold 15 works by Monet to-date in 2015, which together have achieved $209 million. Those works were led by another example from the Nymphéas series from 1905, sold at Sotheby’s New York this May for $54 million. 

Cy Twombly and Clyfford Still at Auction

 

  

Cy Twombly

Untitled, 2005

Estimate: $35,000,000 – 45,000,000

 

On 15 November, Phillips’ Evening Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art in New York will be led by Cy Twombly’s monumental Untitled, 2005. With exceptional provenance and estimated at $35-45 million, Untitled is a masterpiece from one of Twombly’s last epic series that found its inception in his blackboards and crystallized in the three discrete suites of paintings collectively known as the Bacchus series. The Bacchus paintings began in 2003 amidst the US invasion of Iraq and culminated in 2008 when the artist donated three of the monumental works to the Tate Modern, London. The present work is the second-largest canvas from the 2005 series which were exhibited under the collective title Bacchus Psilax Mainomenos. Recalling the artist’s earlier Blackboard paintings from the late 1960s with its continuous looping forms, the Bacchus series revisits this earlier motif with a renewed vigor and energy which manifests on the surface of Untitled.

 

Jean-Paul Engelen, President, Americas, and Worldwide Co-Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, said, “With the top ten auction prices for works by Cy Twombly having all been set in the past eight years, it’s clear that the market is stronger than ever.  At sixteen feet wide, Untitled is among the largest of Twombly’s works to ever appear at auction, with its subject referring to the dual nature of the ancient Greek and Roman god of wine, intoxication, and debauchery. The work hails from the series that marked Twombly’s ultimate artistic expression at the summit of his career and we are proud to offer this masterpiece as the highlight of our Fall season.”

 

The translation of Bacchus Psilax Mainomenos references both the exuberance and rage that alcohol can bring, with Tate Director Nicholas Serota remarking about the paintings, “They relate obviously to the god of wine and to abandon, and luxuriance, and freedom.” The work also recalls one of the most violent and emotionally stirring moments of Iliad, when the Greek hero, Achilles, kills the Trojan prince, Hector, dragging his corpse in circles through the desert around the walled city of Troy—just as Twombly’s red line colors the ground of Untitled.

 

The repetition of the mythical theme in Twombly’s work, particularly the continued invocation of Bacchus across the years, finds its stylistic parallel in Twombly’s signature, circular, scrawling gesture.  Two extremes rise and fall within one ancient deity, cycling, one over the other, just as Twombly’s brush turns across the surface of Untitled. This gesture appeared in the artist’s earlier Blackboard series of the 1960s, making a reprise in Untitled, though with a much wilder red spiral.  The red line of Untitled is rich with emotive movement as the spiral turns and drips across the canvas, the result of Twombly likely using his whole body, swinging the brush, which he attached to a long pole, across the canvas.

Executed in the final decade of Cy Twombly’s life, Untitled, 2004, pays homage to the Mediterranean sea of his adopted home in Italy. It is one of ten paintings that comprise the artist’s acclaimed Untitled (Winter Pictures) series, which the artist painted in the winter of 2003-2004 from his home in Gaeta. Building on Twombly’s epic series Quattro Stagioni (A Painting in Four Parts), 1993-1994, in the collection of Museum of Modern Art, New York, the series Untitled (Winter Pictures) points to Twombly’s preoccupation with the classical leitmotif of nature’s seasons. A remarkable example of Twombly’s inimitable painterly practice, Untitled is built up with coats of acrylic paint that the artist applied to the wooden panel with a combination of brush, cloth and hand. While works from this series typically feature similar cascading vertical lines, Untitled is one of only two painting distinguished by repeated circular blotches that run in splattering rivulets like dripping clouds beyond the edges of the pictorial suppor

 

 

Cy Twombly, Leda and the Swan, 1962, oil, lead pencil and wax crayon on canvas

 Christie’s will offer Cy Twombly’s Leda and the Swan, 1962 as a highlight of its May 17 Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale. This unequivocal tour de force has resided within a private collection for over 25 years and has not been seen publicly in all that time. One of two large format masterpieces to emerge from this unbridled subject, Leda and the Swan’s heroic sister painting of the same title is among the most popular works on view within the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Never before at auction, the painting has only had two private owners and is completely fresh to the market (estimate $35-55million).

Koji Inoue, International Director, Post-War and Contemporary Art, remarked: 

“Hidden from public view for over 25 years, we are thrilled to present one of Cy Twombly’s absolute masterpieces in Leda and the Swan, 1962. This is a remarkable painting that has been pursued by collectors for decades. Impregnated with paint passionately and poetically applied with the hand, brush and stick, Leda and the Swan, is one of the most vital canvases created during this transformative period in the artist’s career. Given its tremendous importance within the context of both Twombly’s oeuvre, and the canon of Post-War art, we are honored to have the opportunity to offer this work to the market after nearly thirty clandestine years. This is also a particularly exciting time for the Twombly market, given its overlap with the Centre Pompidou’s groundbreaking retrospective of the artist’s expansive career.”

With its vigorous application of paint and affectionate use of the hand, Leda and the Swan is an apex example of the artist’s fusing of myth, eroticism and history. Revisiting the story of Leda’s seduction by the Greek god Zeus, or his Roman counterpart, Jupiter, in the form of a swan*, Twombly’s adaptation of this classical story inspired an increasingly baroque tendency that emerged in his work during the early 1960s, dramatically enriching the strongly tactile and sensual nature of his art. Throughout these paintings from the early 1960s, the artist not only arrives at, but fully executes some of the most empowering themes found throughout his oeuvre.

Leda and the Swan is part of a cycle of works that resulted from the explosive and highly physical release of passion, seduction and visceral energy that had defined Twombly’s Ferragosto paintings, which were executed throughout the hot summer months of 1961. Demonstrating this new, distinctly Baroque mix of eroticism and violence, Leda and the Swan exemplifies the “blood and foam” style that dominated the artist’s work until 1966.

The myth of “Leda and the Swan” is among dramatic and tumultuous themes in Twombly’s work of the early 1960s. A magnum opus of the artist’s oeuvre, Leda and the Swan fully articulates Twombly’s desire to defeat tradition even as he engaged with it. Immersing himself in ancient Greek and Roman literature, Twombly demonstrates the breadth of the artist’s cultural immersion in his Mediterranean surroundings.

The auction record for Cy Twombly was set by Untitled (New York City), oil based house paint and wax crayon on canvas, 1968, which realized $70,530,000 in November 2015.

 On 11 May 2016 Sotheby’s New York will offer Untitled (New York City) by Cy Twombly in the Contemporary Art Evening Sale. The work is the only painting from the famed Blackboard series executed with blue loops on grey ground and boasts a remarkable history. It was acquired by the current owner from the artist’ s studio immediately after it 2 was executed in 1968, and has not been seen in public since. Untitled (New York City) is expected to fetch in excess of $40 million.

 Untitled (New York City) is a one-off example of the artist’s most hallowed series of Blackboard paintings through which he forged a new visual language in a period of great convergence in postwar art. However, unlike every other Blackboard painting that bears white loops, in Untitled (New York City) Twombly used a blue, rather than white, wax crayon to create the endless ove rlapping loops on the wet paint. At over 28 square feet, the work belongs to the elite group of large-scale works by Twombly that can be found in the world's great museums including: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Menil Collection, Houston; and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. 

The appearance of Untitled (New York City) at auction comes just six months after Sotheby’s set a record for the artist with Untitled [New YorkCity], 1968 from the collection of Los Angeles philanthropist Audrey Irmas. That work was the second Twombly Blackboard to exceed $65 million in the previous 18 months. 

The sale will also include a major late Twombly: Untitled (Bacchus 1st Version V) . The appearance of the 2004 work in May marks the first time an example from the series, that is widely recognized as defining the artist’s late work, has appeared at auction. The painting is expected to fetch in excess of $20 million and will also be on view in Los Angeles alongside highlights by Franci s Bacon and Andy Warhol.

On May 10, Christie’s will feature

Clyfford Still’s PH-234, 1948 (estimate: $25-35m)

among the top lots of its New York Evening Sale of Post-War & Contemporary Art.

The majority of Still’s work resides in the collections of museums and institutions, including the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, making the appearance of PH-234 a rare opportunity to acquire an extraordinary and iconic example of Still's work at the heights of his artistic power. In its’ nearly 60 years PH-234 has only had two previous owners and was included in an major Still retrospective curated by James Demetrion at The Hirshhorn Museum in 2001, Clyfford Still: Paintings, 1944-1960.

 Laura Paulson, Chairman, Post-War and Contemporary Art, America’s, remarked: “Clyfford Still’s paintings are among the most powerful and important produced in latter part of the twentieth century, and we are honored to present PH-234 in one of the rare instances that an example of this magnitude comes onto the market from the artist. PH-234 is a consummate masterpiece by Still, which conveys the essence of his awe-inspiring oeuvre. Demonstrating Still’s distinctive style and technique, PH-234 quickly reveals the rich and almost limitless possibilities of color, surface and space. Originally acquired in 1957 by visionary English collector, Ted Power, who was one of the first English collectors to acquire major examples of the New York School and Pop Art, PH-234 is a commanding representation of the visceral potency of Abstract Expressionism at its zenith.”


Still’s reputation as one of the giants of Abstract Expressionism is built upon this mastery of the painterly process. Unique among his contemporaries, Still built up his richly textured surface by painting layer upon layer of richly pigmented oil paint carefully sculpting and applying each brush stroke. Still would often scrape away the surface only to rebuild it again, resulting in a surface both densely layered with color or often transcendent, conveying deep, mystical space. The spatial relationships created from this process and Still's vision, especially as seen in PH-234, result in a composition that is dynamic, almost topographical, and what ultimately defined Still's mastery of the canvas and set him apart from his colleagues such as Pollock, Newman and Rothko.

This painting was produced during the period immediately after Still's first great solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century Gallery in February 1946. In the introduction to the exhibition Still's then friend, Mark Rothko, related Still's new art to the epic and transcendent dimension of "Myth" and explained how Still, "working out West, and alone," had, with "unprecedented forms and completely personal methods," arrived at a completely new way of painting.  The simple, seemingly organic forms of Still's painting and its bold expansive fields of space and color made, "the rest of us look academic" Jackson Pollock observed at the time.
PH-234 was shown in Still’s first solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1951, and acquired in 1957 by E.J. "Ted" Power, one of the great collectors of international postwar art. Beginning in the mid-1950s, Power sought out the newest and most radical art he could find. He taught himself to discern what moved him and refined his eye to search for quality works by artists such as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman. He acquired PH-234 in January 1957 after becoming enthralled with the work of the Abstract Expressionists at the important exhibition of new American art organized by the Tate Gallery in London.

Still’s work, and examples such as PH-234, in particular represent the pinnacle of Abstract Expressionism—a pure form of painting that relies solely on its creator to express the power and intense visceral nature of its form. His best works have an inherent power that is perhaps best summed up by Still himself, who in a rare moment of retrospection characterized the fundamental raison d’etre of his work when he concluded, "You can turn the lights out. The paintings will carry their own fire" (C. Still, quoted in M. Auping, Clyfford Still, exh. cat. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2002, p. 303). This painting carries this fire to its very core.  

Top three lots for Clyfford Still at auction

1. 1949-A-No. 1, oil on canvas, 1949 | Sale of Sotheby's New York: Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Estimate: $25,000,000 - 35,000,000 | Price Realized: $61,682,500

2. 1947-Y-No. 2, oil on canvas, 1947 | Sale of Sotheby's New York: Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Estimate: 15,000,000 - 20,000,000 | Price Realized: $31,442,500

3. 1947-R-no. 1, oil on canvas, 1947 | Sale of Christie's New York: Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Estimate: $5,000,000 - 7,000,000 | Price Realized $21,296,000

Masterworks | Portland: Botticelli

Dec 21, 2022 – May 14, 2023

The Portland Art Museum is pleased to present Sandro Botticelli’s masterwork Madonna of the Magnificat, a tondo (round painting) of the Madonna and Child with angels. This rarely seen work is a variant of the artist’s celebrated painting in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, considered one of the finest Madonna and Child paintings of the Renaissance and a high point of Botticelli’s career.

Sandro Botticelli (Italian, 1445–1510), Madonna of the Magnificat, ca. 1483. Tempera, oil, and gold on wood panel. Private collection. Image courtesy of Christie’s.

Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510) was a leading artist of the Renaissance, a moment of tremendous creativity when artists and thinkers drew inspiration from the classical past and adopted a more humanistic approach. First apprenticed to a goldsmith, Botticelli later joined the workshop (bottega) of painter Filippo Lippi (ca. 1406–1469), who was praised by his contemporaries for his elegant compositions and skillful deployment of color. Over many years, Botticelli learned the methods of panel painting and fresco and absorbed Lippi’s refined style and proportions, attentiveness to fabrics, and one-point perspective. By 1470, Botticelli had his own independent practice and was gaining recognition for his work. He combined Lippi’s linear elegance with a more vigorous, sculptural form; a greater naturalism graces his art, always tempered by a search for ideal beauty.

Botticelli’s depiction of the Madonna and Child with angels is a masterpiece of both composition and symbolism. Painted in the tondo (round) format, Madonna of the Magnificat (ca. 1483) exhibits a series of harmonious curvilinear forms. The Madonna gracefully bends forward over Christ, embracing him with her arms and torso, while at the left, a standing angel dressed in rich carmine leans lovingly over two kneeling angels, enclosing them with his right arm. The dome of heaven, flecked with gold stars, ensconces the holy scene in a perfect circle. The rose motif of the Madonna’s throne, the fruit in her left hand, and the window behind her further the symphony of round shapes. 

Madonna of the Magnificat was formerly in the collection of the late Paul Allen, who acquired it in 1999. Other masterpieces from Allen’s collection were featured in Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection, which debuted at the Portland Art Museum in October 2015. This painting appears at the Museum on special loan from a private collector, presenting an extraordinary opportunity for the public to experience this superb artwork by an icon of the Italian Renaissance.

Monet at Auction II

 Also see Monet at Auction

Claude Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, effet de brume will be a highlight of Christie’s 20/21 London to Paris sale series, offered in the 20th / 21st Century: London Evening Sale on 28 June. Depicting the Thames under an effervescent sunlit haze, 

Waterloo Bridge, effet de brume (1904, estimate: in the region of £24 million) comes from Monet’s monumental, landmark series entitled Vues du Londres (Views of London), which celebrates London’s unique character, architecture and ever-changing atmosphere. The artist focused on the play of light across the Thames through three principal subjects – Charing Cross Bridge, the Houses of Parliament, and Waterloo Bridge. In contrast to the bustling modernity of the Charing Cross paintings and the solemn grandeur of the Houses of Parliament compositions, Monet’s views of Waterloo Bridge stand as pure meditations on colour, light, and atmosphere, evocatively capturing the shifting character of the famous bridge under varying weather conditions at different times of the day.

The sale of Waterloo Bridge, effet de brume follows the exceptional price achieved for 

Le Parlement, soleil couchant, from The Collection of Anne H. Bass, which sold for $75.9 million on 12 May 2022, setting a record for a painting from Monet’s Vues du Londres. Of the 41 paintings of Waterloo Bridge which Monet painted, 26 are in public institutions, including The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo; Bührle Foundation, Zürich; Art Institute of Chicago; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and Kunstmuseum Bern. Waterloo Bridge, effet de brume comes to auction following a long-term loan to the Kunstmuseum Basel.

In Waterloo Bridge, effet de brume, Monet records an early morning view, choosing the moments in which the bright light of the rising sun breaks through the layers of haze and mist, sending rippling golden rays of sunshine into the sky, and across the surface of the water. The painting stands as a testament to Britain's significant impact on international artists, highlighting the cultural dialogue between London and Paris in the art historical canon. Depicting the bridge head-on, its rhythmic arches spanning the entire width of the canvas, Monet allows the structure to become the primary focus of the composition, giving it a solid sense of monumentality amidst the otherwise intangible elements of the scene.

The Waterloo Bridge views
Monet captured his views of Waterloo Bridge in a remarkably varied number of ways*, exploring the scene through a subtly shifting range of colours, from luminous blues to delicately-hued violets and soft greens, tracing the effects of the notoriously capricious weather conditions. For an artist whose life had been spent in the pursuit of capturing the transitory effects of weather on the landscape in painterly form, these unpredictable, often fast-moving meteorological effects by turn beguiled, thrilled, infuriated and disheartened him. Rendered in an array of deftly applied strokes and flecks of pigment, in Waterloo Bridge, effet de brume, Monet eloquently conjures the effect of the constantly changing atmosphere on the scene, heightening the feeling of the softly enveloping haze of the title through an intricate play of opacity and translucency.

An illustrious and impeccable provenance
Waterloo Bridge, effet de brume was purchased in 1905 by Paul Durand-Ruel, who had staged the highly successful inaugural exhibition of the series at his gallery in May 1904, and sold almost immediately to Mrs. A. Stern, with whom it remained until 1919. The painting subsequently passed through several important collections, including those of Adolph Lewisohn and the D.P. Allen Memorial Art Museum, at Oberlin College in Ohio, before being acquired by Arde Bulova, Chairman of the renowned Bulova Watch Company in 1951.

Originally founded by Joseph Bulova in New York in 1875, the Bulova Watch Company rapidly expanded during the early 20th century, quickly becoming America’s largest watch company.  This growth was fuelled by innovative designs and creative marketing that included America’s very first radio and TV commercials as well as collaborations with celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh and NASA. In addition to being a successful entrepreneur, Arde Bulova was a dedicated philanthropist who was at the forefront of championing equal access for people with disabilities.  He founded The Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking that provided tuition-free education to disabled WWII veterans as a means of rehabilitation, combined with master watchmaking skills and dedicated job placement.

Waterloo Bridge, effet de brume was passed down through the Bulova family to Arde’s nephew Paul Bulova Guilden, a New York entrepreneur, philanthropist, and dedicated supporter of the arts throughout his life, who held the role of Chairman at the legendary John B. Stetson Company for three decades.

Taking place on 28 June 2022, three auctions focus on the influential artistic synergies that exist between London and Paris. 20/21 London to Paris is comprised of the 20th / 21st Century: Marc Chagall, Colour of Life, 20th / 21st Century: London Evening Sale, and the 20th / 21st Century: Paris Evening Sale. 

Katharine Arnold, Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art, Europe and Keith Gill, Head of Impressionist and Modern Art, London: “Monet’s representation of London’s Waterloo Bridge, effet de brume and his painting Nymphéas, temps gris – a work that arguably anticipated abstraction. Jeff Koons’ iconic Balloon Monkey sculpture will form a significant charitable donation and highlights the urgent need to support those affected by the ongoing war against Ukraine. These works are the backdrop against which contemporary painters and sculptors, ranging from Rachel Jones to Simone Leigh, are presented. We look forward to celebrating London and Paris with our collectors, both in person in our salerooms and via livestream globally."

CLAUDE MONET’S NYMPHÉAS, TEMPS GRIS AND WATERLOO BRIDGE, EFFET DE BRUME

Following the outstanding prices achieved by Christie’s in New York in May for two works from Monet’s highly influential Vues de Londres and Nymphéas series from the Collection of Anne H. Bass, two further works from these iconic series will now be offered in 20/21 London to Paris. Claude Monet’s depictions of the horticultural paradise that he designed and cultivated in Giverny stand among the greatest works of his career. Nymphéas, temps gris (estimate: £20,000,000-30,000,000, illustrated page one, lower left) is one of a rare series of Nymphéas that Monet painted in 1907 in a vertical format to capture the spectacular effects of late afternoon light upon his water lily pond. Others from the series grace museum collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Artizon Museum, Tokyo.

In Waterloo Bridge, effet de brume (1904, estimate: £22,000,000-32,000,000, illustrated page one, lower right), Monet records an early morning view of the London landmark, choosing the moments in which the bright light of the rising sun breaks through the layers of haze and mist, sending rippling golden rays of sunshine into the sky, and across the surface of the water. Monet painted 40 views of Waterloo Bridge at different times of the day and with different atmospheric effects. Their importance has led to 26 of these views residing in museum collections including The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo; Bührle Foundation, Zürich; Art Institute of Chicago; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and Kunstmuseum Bern. The painting was acquired in 1951 by the entrepreneur and philanthropist Arde Bulova and has remained in his family ever since. This London view by the leading Impressionist artist stands as a testament to Britain’s significant impact on international artists, highlighting the cultural dialogue between London and Paris in the art historical canon. 

Claude Monet (1840-1926)
Saule pleureur
oil on canvas
51 3/8 x 43 3/8 in. (130.5 x 110.2 cm.)
Painted in 1918 – 1919
Estimate: HK$95,000,000 – 135,000,000/ US$12,200,000 – 18,000,000

Hong Kong – Christie’s is delighted to announce the Asian auction debut of Saule pleureur, a masterpiece by Claude Monet, at Christie’s 20th and 21st Century Art Evening Sale, to be held on 26 May at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.

Monet reacted to the onset of unrest in Europe in 1914 with an outpouring of creativity, culminating in a period now known as the great final flowering of his career. During this period, the artist embarked on a series of ten paintings depicting a majestic weeping willow lining the artist’s famous lily pond in Giverny, which itself was the subject of the famed and monumental Grandes décorations, later donated to the nation of France to celebrate victory in the First World War. The Weeping Willow series has been described as some of Monet’s most direct and poignant works of the time, and it had been Monet’s intention that one from this great series would too join the gift to the nation. Saule pleureur remains arguably one of the best works in the series, and is one of only five from the series in private ownership.

Exceptional for its all-consuming emotive intensity, the painting is executed with forceful brushstrokes in pulsating hues. Its hero is the giant willow tree, soaring upwards to the entire height of the enormous canvas, its tumbling foliage falling like a shimmering cascade of water from above. The regal strength and quiet dignity of the tree trunk is balanced in contrast with the tranquility and ethereality of the lily pond in the lower right corner, infused with the suppressed but pulsating energy in the air and glimmering light through the falling leaves from the great boughs of the tree. In sum, Saule pleureur is a dramatically beautiful work of genius, as well as a record of an important chapter in history. Even more poignantly, this is Monet’s manifestation of his faith in the redeeming power of resilience, hope, and optimism.

The Collection of Salvador and Christina Lang Assaël
CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926)
Soleil couchant, temps brumeux, Pourville
oil on canvas
24¼ x 29¼ in. (61.5 x 74.3 cm.)
Painted in 1882

$2,500,000-3,500,000

The Impressionist and Modern Works on Paper and Day Sale will be led by a notable work by Claude Monet, Soleil couchant, temps brumeux, Pourville ($2,500,000-3,500,000). With an impressive provenance and exhibition history, this work was painted in 1882, the same year as the seventh Impressionist exhibition in Paris. It demonstrates the increasingly bold and provocative style at a critical phase of Monet’s career. 

Claude Monet, (1840-1926), Champ d'avoine et de coquelicots, signed and dated 'Claude Monet 90' (lower right), oil on canvas, 25.5/8 x 36.1/4 in. (65 x 92.1 cm.) Painted in Giverny in 1890. © Christie's Images Ltd 2022.

Claude Monet’s Champ d’avoine et de coquelicots, (estimate: $12 million – 18 million) will highlight the 20th Century Evening Sale during the Spring Marquee Week of sales. The 1890 masterwork comes to Christie’s from an Important Private French Collection along with two wonderful examples from the late 19th century offered in the Impressionist and Modern Art Day Sale: Alfred Sisley’s Femme et enfant sur le chemin des près, Sèvres (estimate: $400,000 – 600,000) and Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot’s Le gros arbre (environs de Gournay) (estimate: $200,000 – 300,000). The group of three paintings is incredibly fresh to market, having been held in the same private family collection for decades, and in the case of the Monet, for over a century.

 Like his Impressionist friends, Monet had long been dedicated to the portrayal of the passing effects of light and atmosphere on the landscape. At the beginning of the 1890s he took this interest a step further when he began to work predominantly in series, painting the same scene multiple times, each canvas rendered with varying palettes depending on the time of day and weather effects. Champ d’avoine et de coquelicots is a brilliant example of this practice, demonstrating how Monet transformed the beautiful countryside of his beloved Giverny into symphonic harmonies of color and light. Capturing the abundantly flowering poppy field, this is one of a series of five works, each of which depict this dazzling rural spectacle.

Antoine Lebouteiller, Head of Impressionist and Modern Art Department, Paris remarks, “We are so pleased to offer Champ d’avoine et de coquelicots in our 20th Century Evening sale this Spring. This painting is a true masterpiece that brings to life the critical development of Monet’s seminal serial method during this all-important period in his practice. Painted near the artist’s Giverny home, the canvas features a lush field of impastoed color in jewel-like tones of red, orange, and emerald green juxtaposed with soft lilac hues in the distance, beautifully capturing the ephemeral effects of light and atmospheric conditions. It is an honor to steward this painting alongside two works from the same collection by 19th century masters, Sisley and Corot. These three works, which have been hidden away in a private collection for over half a century, together showcase the artistic tenets that lay at the heart of Impressionism.”

Monet settled in Giverny in 1883. Over the following years, he came to know the landscape intimately in a way that made possible the extended serial treatment that underscores his later artistic production. After a number of painting campaigns around France and further afield in the late 1880s, in the summer of 1890, Monet became entirely engrossed by Giverny. He pictured surroundings in their most abundant, elemental form, emphasizing the agrarian nature of the land. In this way, he reacquainted himself with the pastoral beauty of Giverny while further establishing his legacy as the key artist of rural France. The approach that Monet employed in Champ d’avoine et de coquelicots and the accompanying works created throughout autumn of 1890 would mark the start of a decade that is defined by the artist’s highly celebrated series, including the Meules and Peupliers.

Monet’s Champ d’avoine et de coquelicots was originally acquired by the legendary art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel directly from Monet in May of 1891, one year after its creation. In 1914, it was acquired by a private collector; the painting has remained in the family’s collection until present day.

PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED PRIVATE FRENCH COLLECTION
CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926)
La Mare, effet de neige
signed and dated ‘Claude Monet 75’ (lower left)
Painted in Argenteuil in 1874-1875
Estimate: $18 million – 25 million  

Christie’s has announced Claude Monet’s masterwork La Mare, effet de neige (estimate: $18 million – 25 million) will be a highlight of the 20th Century Evening Sale taking place live on 12 May 2022 at Rockefeller Center. A historic masterpiece, the exemplary painting was among the selection of Monet canvasses represented at The Fourth Impressionist Exhibition in 1879. The work is incredibly fresh to market, having been held in a single private collection for over 70 years. Christie’s Restitution Department was privileged to provide research that helped facilitate a settlement agreement between the current owners and the heirs of Richard Semmel, the persecuted collector, who owned the painting during the Nazi era. The painting will be on exhibition at Christie’s Hong Kong 20-21 April.

Anika Guntrum, International Director, 20th & 21st Century Art, remarks: Claude Monet’s La Mare, effet de neige is undeniably one of the masterpieces of the Impressionist movement. The spontaneity and the freedom of execution seen in the rendering of light and atmosphere is a veritable tour de force.  The blanket of white snow, melting along the edge of the pond is a genius pretext for the artist to reveal, by touches of silvery blue and rose tones, a hint of springtime to come.”

MONET’S LA MARE, EFFET DE NEIGE

Claude Monet painted La Mare, effet de neige in Argenteuil winter of 1874-1875. The aethereal landscape employs tonal blue and white hues to create a frosted snowscape, bordered by homes with snow-dusted roofs. A trio of silhouetted figures, dwarfed by trees, traverse the scene. The work is brilliant, charming and subtle, standing as a superb example of Monet’s experimentation with the Impressionist style in the mid-1870s. During this crucial period of his practice, his increasingly loose brushwork and thick application of paint began to formally convey the more ephemeral and atmospheric effects of the natural world.

La Mare, effet de neige was sold a few months after its execution, at an auction at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris. Monet organized this sale with his fellow Impressionist painters, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley, after the poor critical reception of The First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874. At this sale, Paul Durand-Ruel, art dealer and champion of the Impressionists, purchased 18 of the 73 works offered, including Monet’s La Mare, effet de neige.

La Mare, effet de neige was exhibited publicly for the first time four years after it was complete at The Fourth Impressionist Exhibition or “4e exposition faite par un Groupe d’artistes Indépendants.” Monet had  initially been reluctant to participate in the exhibition, however, Gustave Caillebotte eventually convinced him to join. Twenty-nine works by the artist were included in the show, three of them Argenteuil winter landscapes—including La Mare, effet de neige. This group of 29 represented the full range of Monet’s mature oeuvre. They were all hung in the fifth and final room of the exhibition space, declaring their importance. As put by a 1879 article in Le Siècle, “the last room belongs to the high priests of Impressionism.” Despite his work being the crown jewel, Monet never visited the exhibition during its month-long run. Regardless, the show was a rousing success, with overwhelmingly positive reviews in the press.

Durand-Ruel held the painting until at least 1879. By 1893, the work had entered the collection of Henri Vever, one of the most important jewelry designers in fin-de-siècle France, and a major collector of Japanese prints and Impressionist pictures. In 1898, the painting was in the Holthusen collection, in Hamburg, Germany.

The Modern Evening Auction is highlighted by one of Claude Monet’s greatest masterpieces—the visionary depiction of Venice from 1908, Le Grand Canal et Santa Maria della Salute. Painted during the artist’s only trip to La Serenissima, this work captures the majesty of a city Monet once called “too beautiful to paint.” The finest example in the limited series painted from the steps of the Palazzo Barbaro, Le Grand Canal et Santa Maria della Salute radiates with an ethereal luminescence and sublime coloration. Monet’s unparalleled ability to capture shifting light and the palpable atmosphere of the city set this work apart, presenting one of the artist’s greatest Venice pictures ever to come to market.

Claude Monet

Le Grand Canal et Santa Maria della Salute 

Works by two of the most internationally acclaimed artists were unveiled at Sotheby’s Hong Kong this past week, ahead of Sotheby’s Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction in London on 2 March.  A stunning example of Claude Monet’s Nymphéas series, this depiction of the waterlilies at Giverny was painted between 1914 and 1917. The culmination of the artist’ progression towards true abstraction, this ground-breaking series is widely considered his greatest achievement, and this expressive, later work perfectly encapsulates the artist’s vision on a grand scale. Having last been at auction in 1978, the work has not been exhibited since 1995, when it went on view across three museums in Japan. It is now coming to auction from a distinguished Japanese private collection.  Claude Monet's Coin du bassin aux nymphéas. Courtesy Sotheby's. In the wake of the exceptional $70.4m result achieved at Sotheby’s last May for Monet’s Le Bassin aux nymphéas (1917-19), Sotheby’s will now bring to auction another late masterpiece by the artist, Coin du bassin aux nymphéas from 1918, which comes to the market later this month for the first time in nearly 25 years. The painting will be another star highlight of Sotheby’s newly-conceived Modern Evening Auction, alongside Frida Kahlo’s Diego y yo (Diego and I). Monet’s large, color-drenched canvas characteristically paves the way towards 20th-century abstraction, providing a critical bridge between the various components of the sale, which ranges from Alfred Sisley to Alexander Calder to Lee Krasner.  “Monet’s late works have long been acknowledged as critical to the evolution of Modern art, and their appreciation by the market has never been stronger – their large scale, sumptuous colors, and intimations of abstraction are all of irresistible appeal. With its illustrious exhibition history and great provenance, we expect this late work – a tour de force of color and ambition – to excite demand from around the globe”. --Helena Newman, Sotheby’s Chairman, Europe, and Worldwide Head of Impressionist & Modern Art  “Claude Monet remains one of the undeniable icons in the history of art, whose work is beloved around the world for its beauty and perspective-shifting experimentation, and Coin du bassin aux nymphéas represents a quintessential example from his celebrated and famed Water Lilies series. Following our sale earlier this year of the large-scale Le Bassin aux nymphéas for $70.4 million, and the record-breaking auction of Meules in 2019 for $110 million, the market for Monet continues to achieve new heights and milestones, with the Water Lilies series among the artist’s most prized works. A remarkable example of Monet’s late period, Coin du bassin aux nymphéas is a work of impressive scale and presence which transports the viewer to the other worldly magic of Monet’s garden.” --Julian Dawes, Sotheby’s Head of Modern Art, Americas  Coin du bassin aux nymphéas will be on public view at Sotheby’s New York beginning 5 November, alongside the full complement of works from the Modern Evening Auction, as well as The Macklowe Collection, the Contemporary Evening Auction, the Now Evening Auction, and a rare printing of the Constitution.  The famed lily pond at Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny provided the subject matter for the artist’s most celebrated canvases in his late career, including the magnificent Coin du bassin aux nymphéas from 1918. The theme of waterlilies—which became not only Monet’s most celebrated series of paintings, but one of the most iconic images of the Impressionist movement—dominated the artist’s work over several decades, recording the changes in his style and his constant pictorial innovations. Coin du bassin aux nymphéas is a powerful testament to Monet’s enduring vision and creativity in his mature years, and this work, along with the related canvases in the series, led to the celebrated Grandes Décorations now in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris.  In Coin du bassin aux nymphéas, Monet juxtaposes the waterlilies floating on the lilypond’s surface with the reflections of the trees above. Together with the long fronds of the water grasses, the tendrils of weeping willow and boughs of rambling roses lend a truly dynamic sense of motion to the composition. This sense of motion, which Monet developed over many decades, aided in his work having an increasingly abstract treatment of space and a greater focus on the effect of light and shadow, which uses the surface of the water to reflect the wealth of color around it and blurring the boundary between the real and the refracted. By obscuring the horizon line, Monet virtually eliminates traditional perspective and instead builds an abbreviated sense of depth through the contrasting patterns and gestural brushwork in the foliage. The richly worked surface becomes a kaleidoscopic tapestry of color and light built upon the contrasts of the sinewy leaves and rounded blossoms.  In 1914, Monet began to conceive of his Grandes Décorations, a sequence of monumental paintings of the gardens that would take his depictions of the waterlily pond in dramatic new directions. The artist envisaged an environment in which the viewer would be surrounded by the paintings, which had been a dream of the artist’s dating back to the 1890s, when his increasing focus on series pictures–such as his Haystacks, Rouen Cathedrals, Japanese Bridges and Mornings on the Seine–saw his creative process and approach to discrete works of art undergo a marked shift.  Monet’s carefully designed garden at Giverny presented the perfect opportunity for the artist to refine his series paintings, as it provided a micro-cosmos in which he could observe and paint the changes in weather, season and time of day, as well as the ever-changing colors and patterns. Monet thus paid exacting attention to the details of the garden, including maintaining the pond and plants in a perfect state for painting. More broadly, the role of gardens in Impressionist art was the subject of a major exhibition at the Royal Academy in London and the Cleveland Museum of Art, in which this painting featured prominently.  The Grandes Décorations, along with much of Monet’s late production, would influence artists throughout the following generations. The lasting legacy of Monet’s late work is most clearly seen in the art of the Abstract Expressionists, such as Joan Mitchell, Clyfford Still, Jackson Pollock, Sam Francis, and later artists such as Gerhard Richter, whose bold color palette and rejection of figuration is foreshadowed by Monet’s Nymphéas, with Coin du bassin aux nymphéas an influential and emblematic example that remains a hallmark of 20th century art.  xx Claude Monet’s Au jardin, la famille de l’artiste, 1875 (estimate: $12 Million - $18 Million) will be a leading highlight of Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale this November in New York. Publicly exhibited only a handful of times since its creation, the painting was last seen at auction in 1984 and has remained in the same collection ever since.  Keith Gill, Head of Impressionist and Modern Art, Christie’s London: “Created just a year after the first Impressionist Exhibition introduced the public to the artist’s revolutionary plein-air aesthetic and modern subject matter, Au jardin, la famille de l’artiste dates from a key moment in Monet’s career. Offering an intimate glimpse into the quiet routines of his family life, the work is filled with vibrant colour and golden sunlight, and contains all the hallmarks of the artist’s classic Impressionist style. It is an honor to present Au jardin, la famille de l’artiste this November in our 20th Century Evening Sale in New York.” Filled with the warm glow of summer sunshine and the vibrant hues of flowers in full bloom, Au Jardin, la famille de l’artiste is a romantic portrait of the artist’s family, glimpsed in a private moment as they enjoy the calm, tranquil atmosphere of their garden. At the time the work was created, Monet was living in Argenteuil, a lively suburb of Paris, located on the right bank of the Seine just eleven kilometres west of the capital. As with many of the artist’s paintings from 1875, Au Jardin, la famille de l’artisteeschews any details that suggest the rapidly changing character of the town at this time. Instead, the composition restricts its view, focusing on the lush abundance of the intimate space of Monet’s garden, allowing the artist to portray Argenteuil purely as a place of comfort, leisure and peace. The idyllic scene in Au Jardin, la famille de l’artiste captures a sense of the peaceful rhythms that marked Monet’s days during this period. The artist’s wife, Camille, and eldest son Jean, are depicted along with another female figure as they enjoy a leisurely afternoon in the resplendent, well-manicured gardens of their second home in the town. The figures almost disappear amidst the foliage surrounding them, from the tall, towering screen of trees that mark the edge of the garden, to the luscious blooms of the roses, geraniums, and gladioli that fill the carefully cultivated flower beds. Through the briefest of brushstrokes, Monet captures the essential characteristics of each of the different species of flowers that populate the garden, revealing his own keen interest in horticulture and gardening, which would reach its apogee in his famed gardens at Giverny. Au Jardin, la famille de l’artiste has been a highlight of a number of prestigious Impressionist collections since the year it was painted. The painting was purchased directly from the artist shortly after it was completed in 1875 by the renowned French baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, who was an avid early collector of Monet’s work, acquiring over fifty compositions from the artist during the 1870s. Au Jardin, la famille de l’artiste remained in Faure’s collection for over three decades, before selling to Durand-Ruel in 1907, who lent the painting to a number of important early exhibitions of Impressionist art in Germany during the first decade of the 20th Century. The painting was then purchased from Durand-Ruel by the wealthy banker and industrialist, Baron Mór Lipót Herzog in 1911. Herzog was a voracious collector, with interests spanning all eras of art history; his huge collection included Gothic objets d’art, paintings from the Early Renaissance and the Dutch Golden Age, as well as a rich grouping of works by Monet, Renoir, Manet, Cézanne and Gauguin, which hung in the family palace in Budapest. Au jardin, la famille de l’artiste was subsequently acquired by the pre-eminent German collectors Kurt and Harriet Hirschland in 1928, and was among the artworks brought by the family to New York when they were forced to flee Europe in the late-1930s. The painting remained in the Hirschland collection until the mid-1960s, when it passed into the possession of Mr & Mrs David Bakalar of Boston, with whom it remained for a further two decades before being auctioned in their single owner collection sale in 1984, where it was acquired by the present owners.   One of Claude Monet’s finest large-scale Water Lilies paintings ever to appear at auction will star in Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on 12 May in New York. Estimated in the region of $40 million, Le Bassin aux Nymphéas stands among the most iconic and celebrated Impressionist images.  Measuring nearly 40 by 79 inches, this enrapturing canvas from 1917-19 was conceived as part of the artist’s legendary series of monumental paintings depicting his water lily pond at Giverny, the Grandes Décorations, which he began in 1914 and examples of which can be found today in the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. The series took Monet’s paintings of the tranquil lily pond in a radical new direction and were twice the size of his earlier Water Lilies.  Ground-breaking in their nearly abstract treatment of the pond water’s surface and its reflections, these late works are recognized as an important bridge between Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, as practised by Abstract Expressionist artists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, several generations later.  Claude Monet, Le Bassin aux Nymphéas. Sotheby's Gallery Image. Courtesy Sotheby's. LE BASSIN AUX NYMPHÉAS  The water lily pond was the defining motif of the last two-and-a-half decades of Monet’s life and stands among the most iconic and celebrated of all Impressionist paintings. The profound impact the series has made on the evolution of Modern Art renders them Monet’s greatest achievement. The famous lily pond in his garden at Giverny provided the subject matter for most of the artist’s major late works, recording the changes in his style and constant pictorial innovations.  How this beautiful and visually dynamic subject came to be the focus of Monet's artistic output can be traced back to 1883, when the artist moved to Giverny where he rented a house with a large garden. Thanks to his ever-increasing financial success, Monet was able to buy the property in the early 1890s and eventually purchased a large adjacent plot of land. It was here in 1893 that, with enormous vigour and determination, Monet swiftly set about transforming the gardens and creating a large pond. There were initially a number of complaints about his plans to divert the river Epte through his garden in order to feed his new pond, which he had to address in his application to the Préfet of the Eure department.  After the turn of the century, the gardens around Monet's Giverny home became the central theme of his work. During 1901-02, Monet enlarged the pond, replanted the edges with bamboo, rhododendron, Japanese apple and cherry trees. Once discovered, the subject of water lilies offered a wealth of inspiration that the artist continued to explore for several decades. The carefully designed garden presented the artist with a microcosmos in which he could observe and paint the changes in weather, season and time of day, as well as the ever-changing colors and patterns. Monet produced series of paintings on the themes of the Japanese footbridge and the water lilies, paying exacting attention to the details of the garden, including maintaining the pond and plants in a perfect state for painting. Towards the end of his life, Monet told a visitor to his studio: "It took me some time to understand my water lilies. I planted them purely for pleasure; I grew them with no thought of painting them. A landscape takes more than a day to get under your skin. And then, all at once, I had the revelation - how wonderful my pond was - and reached for my palette. I've hardly had any other subject since that moment."  In 1914, Monet began work on his Grandes Décorations, a sequence of monumental paintings of the gardens that would take his depictions of the water lily pond in a radical new direction. That same year, after constructing an enormous garden that could surround him while he worked, Monet conceived of a group of paintings that would similarly envelop the viewer in a peaceful environment. At this scale, Monet surrounded the viewer with multiple depictions of the lily pond, allowing the shifting colors of the water’s reflections during the course of the day to create a nearly abstract environment of aqueous sensations.  Le Bassin aux Nymphéas was painted as Monet worked on the Grandes Décorations, examples of which can be found in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. In this monumental scale, Monet moved further away from a realistic depiction of the lily pond as the viewer is brought closer to the surface of the pond, seemingly hovering above the shifting colors of the pond's reflections. Monet's palette is more vibrant than in his earlier Water Lillies series, and the handling is decidedly more fluid, with flowers indicated by bold strokes of paint. This heightened sense of the pond's surface also emphasizes the surface of the painting as Monet's dazzling strokes of paint move back and forth, like the reflections of the lily pond, between the ripples in the water. The large scale of the present work suggests that although it may have been conceived outside, it was almost certainly painted in the large studio that Monet had built expressly for the purpose of accommodating the Grandes Décorations. Monet's conception at this point was not to depict the actual pond, but to surround the viewer with the "water surface with no horizon and no shore," an effect the present work achieves with its striking scale and presence.  This extraordinary painting is a powerful testament to Monet’s enduring vision and creativity in his mature years. The lasting legacy of his late work is most clearly seen in the art of the Abstract Expressionists, such as Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Jackson Pollock and Sam Francis, whose bold color planes and rejection of figuration is foreshadowed by the Nymphéas. A Modern Masterpiece  This May, Christie’s will present Claude Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, effet de brouillard, 1899-1903, Estimate on Request (in the region of $35 million) as a highlight of Christie’s newly introduced 20th Century Evening Sale. This rare and important painting is a fine example of Monet’s celebrated Waterloo Bridge series, an exquisite example of his capacity to capture the ephemeral, intangible effects of light on the River Thames. With these pivotal works, Monet effectively paved the way for the trajectory of 20thCentury Art as we now know it. “I adore London, it is a mass, an ensemble, and it is so simple. What I like most of all in London is the fog... I so love London!” – Claude Monet in conversation with René Gimpel the celebrated London dealer. Monet’s impassioned declaration is masterfully conveyed in Waterloo Bridge, effet de brouillard, one of the artist’s monumental, landmark series of London views, the Vues du Londres. Begun in London in 1899, this series remains one of the artist’s greatest achievements, as he transformed the city and its famed fog-filled skies into ethereal, timeless visions of the modern city. Of the three key subjects of this ambitious campaign, the Waterloo Bridge series is the largest, and is renowned for being the most radical and varied and also the most poetic and avant-garde.   Waterloo Bridge, effet de brouillard is the finest example from this iconic series to be offered at auction for over a decade. The finest works from this series are now housed in the great museums of the world, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Art Institute of Chicago, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The present painting compares very favourably with each of these and like them was chosen by Monet to feature as one of eighteen Waterloo Bridges included in his ground-breaking 1904 exhibition, Claude Monet: Vues de la Tamise à Londres at the Galerie Durand-Ruel.  Reacting to this show Georges Lecomte wrote that Monet had never “attained such a vaporous subtlety, such power of abstraction and synthesis”. In Waterloo Bridge, effet de brouillard, Monet has pictured the panoramic eastward vista from the balcony of his hotel room at the fashionable Savoy Hotel. The expansive, waters of the Thames are traversed by the stone bridge that recedes toward the factory-lined south bank beyond. The entire scene is cloaked in an ephemeral, evanescent mist that is illuminated by the invisible sun beyond, its veiled presence casting the city into an extraordinary iridescent blue and pink light. Here, Monet performed alchemy with brush and pigment, deploying the most nuanced flickers and strokes of color to create a composition that has captured the vaporous quality of the atmosphere, and the magical power of light. In his quest to depict his impression of the scene that lay before him, Monet has transformed a fleeting vista of industrial London into a mysterious and deeply contemplative evocation that transcends the bounds of time and place. “It’s a miracle,” wrote Octave Mirbeau. “It’s almost a paradox that one can, with impasto on canvas, create impalpable matter, imprison the sun…to make shoot forth from this Empyrean atmosphere, such splendid fairylands of light. And yet, it’s not a miracle, it’s not a paradox: it’s the logical outcome of the art of M. Claude Monet.” (Claude Monet, Vues de la Tamise a Londres, exh. cat., Galeries Durand-Ruel, Paris, 1904, p. 8). Waterloo Bridge, effet de brouillard was one of the earliest London paintings to enter an American collection when it was acquired in early 1905 by the pioneering Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Amy Lowell. Waterloo Bridge, effet de brouillard remained in the Lowell family by descent until 1978, and was included in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts retrospective of masterpieces by Claude Monet held in America the year after the artist’s death in 1927.

Painted in 1883, Étretat, coucher de soleil exemplifies Claude Monet’s vivid depictions of the Normandy coast, energetically applied in swift, flickering brushstrokes (estimate $1.2/1.8 million). During the 1880s, Monet's main pictorial emphasis grew to encompass more natural themes than the social ones that concerned his earlier works. Previously, Monet’s depictions of the Normandy coastline were populated by leisurely bourgeois scenes or bucolically presented peasants. In the present work, Monet removes these humdrum elements, preferring to paint uninhabited views of the magnificent coastline.

 

Three outstanding paintings from an important private collection including one of Claude Monet 's iconic Nymphéas series will lead the Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in London on 19 June. 

 

"As far as method of colouring is concerned, [the Impressionists] have made a real discovery, whose origin cannot be found elsewhere - neither with the Dutch, nor in the pale tones of fresco painting, nor in the light tonalities of the eighteenth century. […] Their discovery actually consists in having recognised that full light de-colours tones, that the sun reflected by objects tends (because of its brightness) to bring them back to that luminous unity which melts its seven prismatic rays into a single colourless radiance: light."

This is how the French writer and art critic Edmond Duranty articulated the approach of a new group of painters in his essay titled La Nouvelle Peinture, written at the time of the Second Impressionist exhibition in 1876. This group of avant-garde artists, now known as the Impressionists, held the first of their eight group exhibitions in 1874, in opposition to the official, government-sponsored Salon.

Claude Monet, Nymphéas, 1908. Estimate £25,000,000–35,000,000. 

 

 

Claude Monet, Nymphéas , 1908, oil on canvas (est. £25,000 ,000 - 35,000,000 / $31,880,000 - 44,630,000) 

 

Thomas Boyd - Bowman, Head of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sales in London, said: “This beautifully lyrical and softly ephemeral Nymphéas painted in 1908 is a timeless reflection of Monet’s vision and innovation. Acquired in 1932, it has remained a hidden treasure in the same family collection for decades and will now make its very first appearance at auction.” 

 

Monet’s iconic series paintings – long considered the apogee of Impressionism – have in the past year reached new heights in the market. Most recently, at Sotheby’s in New York, his glowing haystacks from 1890 became the first work of impressionist art to exceed $100 million at auction, mere months after a record for a Venetian view wa s set at Sotheby’s in London. The most famous images of all remain those of Monet’s beloved waterlilies, which have left an indelible mark on the history of art and become entrenched in the public consciousness. 

 

The artist’s first steps towards true abstr action, this ground - breaking series is widely considered his greatest achievement. Monet’s meticulously designed water garden in Giverny verged on an all - consuming obsession, as the artist diverted the course of the river near his home and waded out into t he waters daily to preserve the pristine beauty of the waterlilies. The result was a kaleidoscope of colour on his doorstep, forever changing with an unending variety of tones and forms. Amongst Monet’s most desirable waterlilies are those from the period between 1904 – 1909 , when Monet stripped away the banks of the pond, eliminated the horizon line and transformed the water into a mirror for the sky. With its decidedly free brushwork, this painting represents the most sophisticated qualities of his earlier, precise explorations whilst anticipating the innovations that were to follow in the Grande s Décorations housed in the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris . 

 

This stunning example of the Nymphéas series comes to auction along with two other works from the same collection – one an earlier work by Monet , depicting the astonishingly rich fields around Giverny in the spring of 1885; the other a dazzling pointillist depiction of the landscape s urrounding Pissarro's home in a bucolic neighbouring village of Eragny, which he had purchased with financial aid from Monet.

 

 The most famous images of all remain those of Monet’s beloved waterlilies, which have left an indelible mark on the history of art and become entrenched in the public consciousness. The artist’s first steps towards true abstr action, this ground - breaking series is widely considered his greatest achievement. Monet’s meticulously designed water garden in Giverny verged on an all - consuming obsession, as the artist diverted the course of the river near his home and waded out into t he waters daily to preserve the pristine beauty of the waterlilies. The result was a kaleidoscope of colour on his doorstep, forever changing with an unending variety of tones and forms. Amongst Monet’s most desirable waterlilies are those from the period between 1904 – 1909 , when Monet stripped away the banks of the pond, eliminated the horizon line and transformed the water into a mirror for the sky. With its decidedly free brushwork, this painting represents the most sophisticated qualities of his earlier, precise explorations whilst anticipating the innovations that were to follow in the Grandes Décorations housed in the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris . 

Sotheby’s will offer an outstanding group of six paintings by Claude Monet, spanning the 1870s through the 1910s and including many of his most celebrated subjects: water lilies, Venice, a snowscape, the Seine and the Normandy coast. The works are emerging after significant time spent in their respective private collections, including a prime example of the artist’s iconic Nymphéas (‘Water Lilies’) series that was acquired by its present owner in 1955 (estimate $30–45 million*), and a Venice scene restituted to the son of legendary collector Jakob Goldschmidt in 1960 that is on offer from the collection of his grandson, the late Anthony Goldschmidt (estimate $15–20 million). In total, the six Monet paintings are estimated to achieve in excess of $78 million. Each of the works will be on view in London from 10–14 April, before returning to New York for exhibition on 1 May. 

Simon Shaw, Co-Head of Sotheby’s Worldwide Impressionist & Modern Art Department, commented: “The six works by Monet that we are privileged to present this May represent exactly what buyers are seeking at this moment: several of his most famous scenes, emerging from prestigious private collections and completely fresh to the market. We’re undeniably witnessing an exceptional moment for great works by Monet at Sotheby’s. As new generations and new markets rediscover the master, the supply of strong examples remaining in private hands is shrinking fast. The result is fierce competition that leads to the results we have witnessed recently at Sotheby’s.” 

Sotheby’s sold 18 works by Monet in 2014, with buyers from the US, UK, Europe, the Middle East and Asia demonstrating the global appeal of his enduring genius in today’s market. The works together achieved a remarkable $190.5 million, led by another example of the Nymphéas paintings (dated to 1906) that sold for $54.1 million – the second-highest price for any work by the artist at auction. Sotheby’s sold five works by Monet in its February 2015 Evening Sale of Impressionist & Modern Art in London, which together totaled $83.8 million. That group was led by Le Grand Canal, another Venice picture that fetched $35.8 million – the current auction record for a Venice scene by the artist. 

Nymphéas 1905 Estimate $30–45 million 

Monet’s Nymphéas paintings stand as the most celebrated series in Impressionist art. The famous lily pond in the artist’s gardenat Giverny provided the subject matter for most of his major late works, recording the evolution of his style and his constant pictorial innovations. The present example dates from 1905, and has remained in the same distinguished private collection since 1955. 

Until Sotheby’s worldwide exhibitions this spring, the painting has not been viewed in public since 1945. 

This work was included in the seminal exhibition held at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1909, which Monet titled Les nymphéas, series de paysages d'eau par Claude Monet. The artist insisted on payment for almost all the works to be included in the show, resulting in legendary dealer Durand-Ruel – who did not have the funds to bankroll the whole exhibition – having to acquire the pictures jointly with the Bernheim-Jeune brothers. Monet and the dealers chose 48 canvases, all of the same subject, which were shown in three rooms and drew the attention and admiration of countless collectors. 

The first owners of the present Nymphéas were Émil and Alma Staub-Terlinden of Männedorf. Together they amassed one of the finest private collections of Impressionist art in Switzerland, with much of it being purchased over a short period of time around the end of the 1910s. The painting remained in the Staub-Terlinden’s possession for many years, before being acquired by the present owner. 

Le Palais Ducal 1908 Estimate $15–20 million 

Monet’s spectacular view of the Palazzo Ducale on the Grand Canal belongs to the extraordinary series he completed in the fall of 1908 in Venice. Painted from the south-east vantage of a floating pontoon, the scene depicts the Palace, with its Byzantine fenestrations adorning the façade, alongside the Ponte della Paglia and the prison building on the right. Le Palais Ducal was confiscated from noted collector Jakob Goldschmidt by the National Socialist Government in February 1941. The painting was included in a forced auction of the Goldschmidt collection in September of that year, where it was bought as a present for the Nazi industrialist Dr. Albert Vögler – a former client of Jakob, who owed much of his success to Jakob’s financial genius. In 1960, the picture was reclaimed from Vögler’s heirs by Jakob’s son Erwin Goldschmidt, following 10 years of litigation in Hamburg. It subsequently descended to Erwin’s son Anthony Goldschmidt, who died in 2014. Sotheby’s held the first evening sale in its history in1958, with an auction dedicated to a selection of works that Jakob Goldschmidt had been able to get out of Germany – both through friends, and hidden in the trunk of his car. This landmark sale broke numerous records and ushered in a new era for the Impressionist & Modern art market. As it was restituted in 1960, the present work was not offered as part of this famed sale – as a result, it has never been exhibited publicly until Sotheby’s exhibitions this spring. 

Bassin aux nymphéas, les rosiers 1913 Estimate $18–25 million 

A vibrant example from 1913, Bassin aux nymphéas, les rosiers represents Monet at the height of his mature style. Here he depicts an arceaux de roses overlooking the tranquil surface of a pond with scattered clusters of water lilies. Monet painted three oils from this precise vantage point, one of which is now housed at the Phoenix Art Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, and the current version is the largest from this series. The work was acquired by its present owner in 1991. 

Le Chemin d'Epinay, effet de neige 1875 Estimate $6–8 million 

Resplendent with the glimmer and frosty sheen of snow and ice, Le Chemin d'Epinay, effet de neige depicts the trodden road leading into the town of Épinay-sur-Seine on the outskirts of Paris. This picture dates from the height of Monet's involvement with the Impressionists in Paris, when the artist was considered the premier landscape painter of the group – among whom snow scenes (effet de neige) were an important tradition. The present work may have been included in the historic second group showing of the Impressionists in 1876, as both it and a picture currently in the collection of the Albright-Knox Gallery match the description of one listed in the 1876 catalogue. It was acquired by its present owner at a Sotheby’s New York auction in 1984. 

La Seine à Vétheuil 1901 Estimate $6–8 million 

The small village of Vétheuil is situated along the Seine between the city of Mantes and the town of Vernon, and was home to Monet and his family between 1878 and 1880. This picturesque location was the site of some of Monet’s most successful Impressionist landscapes during this period, and continued to fascinate him well into his later career. Of the 15 paintings from the Vétheuil series, a number are now in the collections of major international museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, The Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and The Pushkin Museum in Moscow. The work has remained in the same private collection since 1955, and has never before appeared at auction. 

Claude Monet, Paysage de matin (Giverny), oil on canvas, 1888. US$6-8million

• Paysage de matin (Giverny) is a consummate example of the luminescent landscapes completed by Monet during his distinguished middle career.
• Monet executed these works by situating himself in the midst of the French countryside with the hopes of encapsulating the light and conditions of a summer day within his canvases. Paysage de matin is an exceptional illustration of Monet’s ability to capture the light effects of his beloved Giverny.
• The present work is representative of Monet’s most sought after qualities, contributing to its broad global appeal. 
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