$35M Renoir, Not Seen at Auction for Almost a Century, to Go Under the Hammer at Christie’s

Pierre-Auguste Renoir 1841-1919, France Follow +

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La femme aux lilas (Portrait de Nini Lopez) (1876–1877) will head to auction for the first time in almost a century next month, where it is expected to sell for $25–35 million USD (£18.5–25.9 million). 

The work, owned since 1929 by members of the Whitney Payson family, will lead Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale in New York on 18 May. It has been described by the auction house as among the most important Renoir paintings ever to come to auction.

Max Carter, Christie’s global chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art, said: “Renoir’s gift to art history was the Impressionist portrait, and La femme aux lilas is among its incontestable masterpieces… Its peers are Renoir’s greatest figure paintings of the 1870s, the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist icons from the Whitney Payson collection, and the finest Renoirs ever sold.”

The work features Nini Lopez, described as Renoir’s favourite muse and model, and is the largest single portrait of Lopez remaining in private hands. 

It arrives at auction from the collection of Lorinda Payson de Roulet, who died last November aged 95. A noted collector and former president of the New York Mets baseball team, she was a member of the Whitney Payson family, which includes Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. 

La femme aux lilas was acquired 97 years ago by de Roulet’s parents, Joan Whitney Payson and Charles Payson, for a total of USD$100,000 (£74,000 at current rates). The couple’s collection was described by Carter as “legendary”.

More recently, the painting hung in du Roulet’s Long Island living room. Whitney Bullock, de Roulet’s daughter, said: “We all loved the Renoir. It’s a gorgeous painting. When we would get poshed up and go into the living room, that was the backdrop.” 

In the same year that de Roulet’s parents acquired La femme aux lilas, her uncle purchased another Renoir, Au Moulin de la Galette (1876), for $165,000 USD (£122,000 at current rates). This work last came to auction in 1990, where it sold for $78.1 million USD (£57,737,000), setting the artist’s current auction record.

De Roulet’s collection, presented during New York’s Spring Marquee Week sales, also features works by Marc Chagall, Edgar Degas, Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth.