£40m Monet to be star lot in record-breaking Christie’s sale
A £40 million water-lily painting by Claude Monet was unveiled in London today as the new star lot of potentially the most lucrative auction the capital has seen.
The painting, Nymphéas, brings the total upper estimate for Christie's auction of Impressionist and modern art this month to £231.2 million.
Even the lower estimate for the sale — which includes a Blue Period Picasso, a portrait of Angel Fernández de Soto once owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber, and works by Gustav Klimt, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse and René Magritte — now stands at £163.7 million.
If reached, that would smash the British record for a single sale — established only in February by rival Sotheby's — of £146.8 million. Christie's director Giovanna Bertazzoni said sellers' confidence had been boosted by auctions over the last year topped by the world-record price for any artwork — £70 million for Picasso's Nude, Green Leaves And Bust set in New York last month.
"We are witnessing a great willingness from clients to consign works of art of the highest quality. There is a fierce international demand in the art market, particularly for the rarest and the best," she said.
Nymphéas was painted in Monet's gardens at Giverny where, in his sixties, the artist became fascinated by the effect of light and the reflections in the lily ponds. It is the largest of nine surviving works he painted in 1906 and one of only five from that year later shown in the first exhibition of the water-lily series in Paris in 1909.
The exhibition proved hugely popular and won international acclaim. The work being sold on June 23 stayed for several decades in the ownership of the family of French art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel who championed the Impressionists. Ms Bertazzoni said: "Claude Monet's water-lily paintings are among the most recognised and celebrated works of the 20th century and were hugely influential to many of the following generations of artists."
Sotheby's, meanwhile, put on public display today a masterpiece by JMW Turner which was bought by the 5th Earl of Rosebery in 1878 and has stayed in the family since then.
After three decades on loan to the National Galleries of Scotland, Modern Rome — Camp Vaccino is being sold with an estimate of £12 million to £18 million on July 7.
