Claude Monet’s Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule (1891) will be among the works leading Christie’s 20th-century evening auction next month during marquee spring sales in New York. Expected to sell for between $30m and $50m, it is among the highest estimates of the lots announced so far for the auction season.
The painting is one of 24 in Monet’s Les Peupliers series, inspired by eight cottonwood trees along the banks of the Epte river just south of his house in Giverny. The painting was first displayed at Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie in Paris, and purchased by the legendary Impressionist dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. It remained in his family collection until 1955. The Peupliers painting is now coming to auction from another private collection, where it has been held for more than six decades. Before the sale, the painting will be unveiled in Taipei then return to New York ahead of the 12 May auction. Previously was on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for more than 30 years.
“After being cherished for multiple generations in a family collection and being generously lent to museum exhibitions around the world, we are honoured to present this Impressionist masterpiece,” Vanessa Fusco, the head of Impressionist and modern art at Christie’s New York, said in a statement.
Nine of the 24 Les Peupliers paintings are now in museum collections, including the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate in London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo. Christie’s says this painting is “particularly remarkable” for its crepuscular colour palette and the “dreamlike quality of vibrating and shifting light” during the passage from day to night.
The one-metre-tall Monet riverscape is not the only stand-out work by a canonical French figure of the late 19th century coming to auction next month. Sotheby’s announced on Tuesday it would offer Paul Cézanne's Portrait de Madame Cézanne (1877), a portrait of Hortense Fiquet, the artist's wife. The auction house estimates it will sell for between $5m and $7m; it is one of several works coming to market that is the property of the collectors Rolf and Margit Weinberg.
Other important works of art coming to auction in New York this season include lots from Barnes and Noble founder Leonard Riggio and his wife Louise’s collection, part of dealer Daniella Luxembourg’s personal holdings and Big Electric Chair (1967-68) by Andy Warhol.
