At Sotheby's in Paris, Claude Monet's never-before-exhibited painting "Iris" sold for €50 million, a record for any work of art sold at a French auction.
On October 22, Sotheby's held its sale of the Schlumberger collection in Paris, and the evening's top lot was Claude Monet's "Iris," painted around 1924–25. The monumental, nearly square canvas, spanning almost six feet, carried a pre-sale estimate of €22–30 million and sold for €50 million ($56.2 million) after a 45-minute bidding battle among six contenders. The buyer was a private collector in Asia.
It is a new record for any work of art sold at a French auction, surpassing Modigliani's "Tête de Caryatide," which sold at Christie's Paris in 2010 for €43.2 million. "Iris" itself had never been publicly exhibited: it remained part of the studio holdings Monet left to his son Michel, acquired in 1956 by the Paris gallerist Katia Granoff.
It was Granoff, together with Jeane Schlumberger, heir to the Schlumberger industrial fortune, who spent five decades from the 1950s building the collection that hung in the family's Paris townhouse. At the October sale it brought a total of €74.4 million ($83.7 million), the most valuable fine-art trove ever sold at Sotheby's Paris, with 74 percent of the lots exceeding their high estimates.
"Tonight, Paris belonged to Monet," said Thomas Bompard, head of Sotheby's France, after the sale.
