Sotheby's La Collection Schlumberger. Le Temps retrouvé 22 October 2026
The quality of a collection lies first and foremost in its works. But it becomes even more beautiful when a certain mystery surrounds that collection, and its sale lifts the veil on masterpieces never before shown to the public. This is one of the many appeals of the Schlumberger Collection and perhaps its very first.
The Schlumberger family's immense success began with two men, brothers Marcel and Conrad, coming from Alsace, who in 1926, the year Claude Monet died, founded the first company of what would become the Schlumberger group (SLB), now based in Houston.
But the Schlumberger collection is the story of two women: Jeanne Schlumberger (1889–1983), the collector, and Katia Granoff, the Parisian dealer who introduced the world to Monet's late-period works and who accompanied her client and friend through most of her acquisitions.
Born the same year as the inauguration Eiffel Tower, Jeanne married Marcel Schlumberger in 1909. Her brother-in-law was Jean Schlumberger, who helped found the NRF (Nouvelle Revue Française) and would go on to publish In Search of Lost Time.
Jeanne was a brilliant woman – a daughter of an engineer, independent, fond of driving fast cars between Paris and Normandy. She was one of the first French women to obtain a driver's license. In 1964, at age 75, she took all her grandchildren to see the first concert of the Beatles in France. She avoided Parisian society life and any publicity around her person her whole life, preferring instead to oversee the properties she owned or patronized, such as the Château de Crèvecœur, intended to become the Schlumberger Museum Foundation, or her manor in Honfleur. Very few photographs of her are known to exist.
Claude Monet, Saule pleureur or L'Arbre de feu, circa 1918-19.. Estimate €9,000,000–12,000,000.
Her meeting in the 1950-s with another powerful woman, the dealer Katia Granoff, revealed Jeanne's extraordinarily visionary eye and this is the other supreme quality of this remarkable collection: Jeanne Schlumberger acquired Monets from the final period (post-1914), such as Irisand Saule pleureur, long before anyone else, at a time when the master of Giverny's last monumental compositions were still largely misunderstood or even rejected - both by public institutions and by the art-market as well, dealers and private collectors. Until 1970, when Michel Monet's bequest was inaugurated at the Musée Marmottan, there were only three places in Paris and in all of Europe that held major works from Monet's final period (the series of LesNymphéas, Iris, Le pont japonais, Saule pleureur): the often-empty rooms of the Musée de l’Orangerie, Galerie Katia Granoff, and the Schlumberger family's townhouse on Rue Las Cases.
Though Jeanne Schlumberger was an active and generous patron throughout her life, she never lent her paintings to exhibitions. Once hung on the walls of Rue Las Cases, the works never left. As a result, they were handled very little and preserved in perfect condition. Unvarnished, unlined, untouched: Iris and Saules remain today exactly as Monet painted them. Faced with canvases so rich in material - "the substance of dreams," as the painter himself called it - where the color is sometimes left unmixed, the sight of the paint surface offers an experience of joy, as moving as it is grand. Gazing at a late Monet that Katia Granoff had sold to MoMA, Mark Rothko would write that looking at the color makes you become that color.
While Jeanne Schlumberger preferred the late Monet to the early Monet, she also had a particular love for 19th-century French painting: Delacroix, Daumier, Courbet, and the young Cézanne decorating the family villa in the manner of the old masters. And above all, Gustave Moreau, the hallucinatory Symbolist: Rêve d'Orient, one of the masterpieces of the Schlumberger Collection, depicts a female figure descending from the sky on a dragon at night, to lull humans to sleep and feed on their dreams and on magnificently colored flowers
To paint the dream by painting flowers. It always comes back to Monet. All roads lead to Monet. The one taken by the Schlumberger Collection has now been found again.
A monumental Monet reveals the radical modernity of his late work and the foresight of two women who championed it.
In the 1950s, when Claude Monet’s late canvases were still dismissed as the faltering efforts of an artist who had been losing his sight, two women saw in them the future of painting. Katia Granoff, a Russian-born dealer who opened a Paris gallery in 1926, had made her name promoting artists including Chaïm Soutine and Pierre Bonnard. Jeanne Schlumberger, an independent-minded patron who shunned Parisian society, was the widow of Marcel Schlumberger, a pioneer of modern oil exploration. She was assembling an intensely personal collection in the family’s townhouse on rue Las-Cases. Where critics saw decline, Granoff and Schlumberger recognized a vision that anticipated some of the defining developments of 20th-century art.
Today, Monet hardly seems like an artist in need of champions. Yet three decades after his death in 1926, his reputation remained firmly rooted in the 19th century. Celebrated as the great hero of impressionism, he had spent the 1910s and 1920s at Giverny producing ever larger canvases in which the natural world edged toward abstraction.
Few paintings better demonstrate the extraordinary daring of Monet’s imagination than “Iris,” created around 1924–25. Nearly six feet across, it is the largest of three horizontal-format iris compositions he made in the 1920s, and the only one still in private hands. Long, dark green leaves surge upward from the bank, punctuated by touches of violet and yellow. To the left, individual blooms can still be identified; farther across the surface, contours dissolve into vigorous strokes of pigment. There is no horizon to steady the eye. Behind the flowers stretches an expanse of blue that could almost be open sky.
Claude Monet, “Iris,” circa 1924-25. €22,000,000-€30,000,000, “The Schlumberger Collection,” October 22, Sotheby’s Paris.
But the blue is the sky reflected in water. For Monet, this was an old fascination: from “Impression, Sunrise” (1872), now at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, to the monumental “Nymphéas” (1914–26) at the Musée de l’Orangerie, he returned repeatedly to the unstable meeting of light, water and their reflections. In “Iris,” the flowers remain recognizable, while the space around them refuses to resolve into bank, pond or sky.
Although cataracts had seriously affected Monet’s vision by the time he created “Iris,” he was pursuing something beyond the fleeting impression: an almost timeless experience of the garden, in which scale and color could envelop the viewer. Here I see a kinship with the ambitions of abstract expressionists Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, who would likewise aspire to contain the cosmos within a single canvas.
So convinced was Granoff that she staked her own fortune on Monet’s neglected canvases. In 1950, she met Michel Monet, the artist’s son, who had inherited the canvases at Giverny. Six years later, he sold her a substantial group. Granoff mortgaged her assets and secured a loan from Schlumberger, who in turn had privileged access to the paintings. Jeanne chose “Iris.”
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, American museums and artists were beginning to recognize this other Monet. In 1955, Alfred H. Barr Jr., founding director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, purchased a monumental “Nymphéas” from the artist’s son, the first such panel to enter an American museum. Displayed prominently at MoMA, its loose, allover handling resonated with contemporary abstraction. Sam Francis, a California-born painter who settled in Paris in 1950, also visited Granoff’s gallery to study Monet’s late canvases. His vast, gestural paintings, suggestive of natural forms, exemplified the tendency known as “abstract impressionism.”
Among the works offered in our landmark Schlumberger Collection auction are two late Monets, “Iris” and “Saule pleureur” (circa 1918-19), alongside works by Cézanne, Gustave Moreau and Camille Claudel. Jeanne preferred to live with her collection rather than lend it for exhibitions. “Iris” remained on the walls of rue Las-Cases for decades, rarely moved or handled. Its canvas is still unlined, its surface unvarnished, with colors in places almost unmixed. Up close, we encounter the extraordinary freedom of Monet’s brushwork; step back, and the irises, water and reflected sky come into focus. For me, the great achievement of “Iris” is how far Monet takes painting without ever leaving his garden at Giverny.
