LONDON – Christie’s has announced they will offer an exceptional water-lily painting by Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926) at the Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale in London on June 23, 2010. Nymphéas, 1906, was included in the artist’s historic exhibition of the water-lily series in Paris in 1909 and remained in the ownership of the celebrated Durand-Ruel art dealing family for a number of subsequent decades. Offered at auction from a private collection, it is expected to realize $44 million to $58 million.
Following the success of the corresponding sale at Christie’s New York on May 4, where Pablo Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves and Bust established a record price for any work of art sold at auction ($106,482,500), some say the London sale may follow suit. The 63 works of art to be offered by Christie’s are estimated in total at $240 million to $338 million, which would make it the most valuable selection of art ever presented at a sale in London.
As well as Claude Monet’s Nymphéas, the auction will also include Portrait of Angel Fernández de Soto, 1903, a Blue Period masterpiece by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), which is also expected to make $44 million to $58 million. The artwork is consigned by The Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation, a charity that focuses on the promotion of arts, culture and heritage in Britain.
Giovanna Bertazzoni, Director and Head of Impressionist and Modern art at Christie's, London commented: “The strong results at our auctions over the last year, and during the last six months in particular, have further fuelled the confidence of vendors; 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, and the market itself is now truly global as illustrated at our auction in New York in May where we saw bidding from Russia, China and the Middle East, as well as from Europe and the Americas.”
Nympheas, 1906, by Claude Monet (1840-1926)
Monet was the most prominent Impressionist painter and is today one of the most celebrated Europeans in art history. In 1890, having finally found fortune to accompany his fame, he bought the house in Giverny in which he had lived since 1883 and with the help of a gardener and a team of assistants, he set about transforming the gardens and building a lily pond to create an aesthetic oasis that would eventually dominate his painting.
Monet only painted the water-garden in Giverny 10 times prior to 1899, perhaps waiting for his landscapes and plants to mature, but in 1899 and 1900 the gardens became a prominent subject for his paintings. He became more and more occupied by the effect of light and the reflections from the water of the pond and became almost obsessed with his depictions of the gardens in Giverny, applying a level of perfectionism that saw him destroy a large number of works with which he was not completely satisfied. This was clearly reflected in a letter that he wrote to his friend Gustave Geffroy in 1908, when he was still occupied with the same theme: ‘You must know I’m entirely absorbed in my work. These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. It’s quite beyond my powers at my age, and yet I want to succeed in expressing what I feel. I’ve destroyed some... I start others... and I hope that something will come out of so much effort.’ (Monet, quoted in R. Kendall (ed.), Monet by himself: Paintings, drawings, pastels, letters, London, 1989, p. 198).
In 1909 at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris, Monet held an exhibition showcasing his Nympheas paintings for the first time, receiving great, international acclaim. The exhibition was so popular, it was extended by a week, and Robert E. Dell, later the editor of Connoisseur magazine and at the time the Paris correspondent of the Burlington Magazine, proclaimed: ‘One has never seen anything like it. These studies of water lilies and still water in every possible effect of light and at every hour of the day are beautiful to a degree which one can hardly express without seeming to exaggerate... There is no other living artist who could have given us these marvelous effects of light and shadow, this glorious feast of colour’ (R.E. Dell, quoted in P.H. Tucker, Claude Monet: Life and Art, New Haven & London, 1995, p. 196). Monet’s fascination with the gardens at Giverny would culminate with the famous display of monumental water-lilies in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, a rare, signed and dated study for which sold for $60 million at Christie’s London in 2008.
The work to be offered at Christie’s is the largest of nine surviving works painted by Monet in 1906, and one of only 5 from the same year shown at the celebrated exhibition in Paris. It remained in the collection of the Durand-Ruel family for a number of decades and was acquired by the present owner a decade ago at Christie’s New York in May 2000.
Visit Christie’s online at www.christies.com.
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