Monet’s €50m Iris sets a new auction high for France

Claude Monet’s Iris took almost 45 minutes to sell at Sotheby’s in Paris on 22 October. By the time the bidding stopped at €43m, the late painting had comfortably passed its €30m high estimate. With fees, the buyer’s bill reached €50m, setting a new nominal auction record for a work of art sold in France.

Six bidders competed, with the picture eventually going to a client represented on the telephone by Jen Hua, Sotheby’s deputy chairman for Asia. Much of the contest advanced in €100,000 steps. As Marion Maneker reported in Puck, Hua at one point raised the bid from €35.1m to €35.5m, briefly interrupting the painstaking climb. Even at this level, the increments mattered.

Painted around 1924-25, Iris measures nearly 1.6 metres high by 1.8 metres wide. Its ownership history is unusually short. From Monet’s estate it passed to his son Michel, then to the Paris dealer Katia Granoff, through whom it entered the Schlumberger collection. Sotheby’s catalogues estate stamps on the front and back. The painting had remained outside public exhibition until its appearance for the sale.

That combination of scale and long private ownership helped to make it the collection’s dominant attraction. Speaking to Puck, the adviser Melanie Clore described demand among major collectors for a substantial, high-quality late Monet. Here was a picture that had spent decades beyond the regular circulation of exhibitions and auctions, arriving with a documented route back to the artist’s studio.

The Schlumberger sale brought €74.4m including fees, with every offered lot finding a buyer. Iris alone supplied roughly two-thirds of the total. Three other Monets accompanied it, while works by Bonnard, Moreau and Claudel broadened a collection whose dispersal gave Paris an unusually concentrated evening of competition.

The French record is a considerable result, although Monet’s international auction high remains much higher: Meules, painted in 1890, sold for $110.7m including fees at Sotheby’s New York in 2019. The importance of Iris lies partly in the setting of the sale. A painting retained in France could command this level of bidding in Paris without being sent to New York.

Elsewhere in the collection, the route to a new owner is taking a different course. Three early Cézannes were withdrawn after receiving national treasure status. Negotiations involving the Schlumberger family, Aix-en-Provence and the French Ministry of Culture are intended to secure them for the Musée Granet. While Iris has found another private buyer, those pictures may yet move from a private collection into a public one.