A Monet painting sold for $56 million at Sotheby’s in Paris on Thursday. Iris is a painting of flowers in Monet’s Giverny water garden. It was purchased by Jen Hua, deputy of Sotheby’s Asia, on behalf of an Asian client. The world record for a painting by Monet is $110.7 million, set by the 2019 sale of the 1890 painting Meules (Grainstacks, in English).
Iris is presumed to have been painted in the open air circa 1924–25, near the end of the artist’s life. It had previously been in the collection of Jeanne Schlumberger, a Schlumberger energy company heiress. She purchased the painting in 1957, with the help of the Paris dealer Katia Granoff. Schlumberger had an extensive collection of Impressionist and modern art. “Once the painting arrived in her house, it left the world,” Thomas Bompard, a senior international specialist at Sotheby’s Paris, said in an interview with the New York Times before the auction. According to Bompard, the painting had never been exhibited.
Cyrille de Gunzburg, a private art dealer in Paris, told the New York Times that he had negotiated the sale of a Monet from the same period for $15 million in 2013. Iris sold after forty-five minutes of bidding on the phones among six prospective buyers. Schlumberger’s descendants chose this year to sell twenty-six other works from her collection. This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of Monet’s death, in 1926. Schlumberger died in 1983.
“This painting could be benchmarked against the great Monets in the museums of Paris,” said Helena Newman, Sotheby’s worldwide chairman of Impressionist and modern art. “It was a true museum-quality work.”