€50m Monet Becomes Most Expensive Artwork Ever Auctioned in France

Claude Monet’s Iris (c 1924–1925) sold for €50 million at Sotheby’s Paris yesterday evening, becoming the most expensive artwork ever auctioned in France.

The work, which had been expected to fetch between €22 million–€30 million (all prices include fees), was sold to a private collector in Asia. 

The price was almost four times the artist’s French auction record, previously set only hours earlier when Christie’s sold Bord des falaises à Pourville (1882) for €12.8 million.

Iris was part of the Jeanne Schlumberger collection, offered at Sotheby’s. Schlumberger met Parisian dealer Katia Granoff in the 1950s; Granoff helped to renew interest in Monet’s late paintings and guided many of Schlumberger’s purchases which, according to Sotheby’s, she kept in her townhouse on Rue Las Cases and did not lend to exhibitions. 

Iris reached the collector through Granoff, who had in turn acquired it from Monet’s son Michel. It was exhibited publicly for the first time at the preview for last night’s auction.

Among the four Monets on sale at Sotheby’s were La Seine à Vernon, l’arbre (1894), which had never previously been exhibited or auctioned, and was known only through a monochrome photograph. The work achieved €4.25 million against an estimate of €1.2 million–€1.8 million.

The sale featured other works returning to public view after decades. Pierre Bonnard’s La cueillette des prunes (c 1899), last exhibited in 1956 and thought to belong to a triptych whose other panels are at Japan’s Pola Museum of Art, realised €2.48 million against a €600,000–€800,000 estimate.

Meanwhile Gustave Moreau’s Rêve d’Orient (1881), absent from auctions and public exhibitions since 1971, returned with a French auction record for the artist at €1.41 million.

In total, La Collection Schlumberger. Le Temps retrouvé netted €74.4 million, with the four Monets accounting for almost 90 percent of the total.

All 23 works offered sold, following the withdrawal of three Cézanne mural fragments painted at his family home, Jas de Bouffan, between 1862–1864. Aix-en-Provence intends to acquire them for the Musée Granet with support from the French ministry of culture. 

More records at Christie’s

Christie’s earlier record-setting Monet came from the sale of Paul Durand-Ruel’s family collection. The dealer, who Monet described as “the only person to whom I owe anything”, had reacquired Bord des falaises à Pourville in 1891, and it had remained with his family ever since.

During the early 1880s, Durand-Ruel’s purchases had helped Monet to finance his Normandy painting trips. The landscape dates from the artist’s second stay in Pourville in 1882, when he rented a house for his family above the cliffs. 

Their relationship also produced commissions: Trois pots de tulipes (1885), offered in the sale, was one of 36 canvases made for Durand-Ruel, 30 of which were designed to decorate the doors of the dealer’s Paris apartment. The work sold for €3.1 million.

In total, Durand-Ruel, Generations of Vision brought €41.66 million from 27 works offered, including €5.84 million for Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Jeunes filles au bord de la mer (1894).

The sale saw other records, too. Alfred Sisley’s La route du Cœur-Volant en hiver, Louveciennes (c 1872) set a French auction record for the artist at €2.79 million, but minutes later, another Sisley, Un Verger (1873) surpassed it minutes later at €3.7 million.

Two landscapes by Gustave Loiseau, each estimated at €150,000–€250,000, set successive world auction records for the French Post‑Impressionist. Falaises, Normandie (1902) made €768,000, before L’Aiguille et la Porte d’Aval (1901) raised the record to €793,600.