A precious canvas from Monet's Water Lilies series goes up for auction at Christie's

One of the canvases from the Water Lilies series by Claude Monet (Paris, 1840 - Giverny, 1926) will be auctioned off on Sept. 26 at Christie’s, during the 20th / 21st Century Inaugural Evening Sale taking place at the British auction house’s Hong Kong headquarters: the venue is none other than The Henderson, the Zaha Hadid-designed skyscraper that is still under construction (it will reach a height of 190 meters when finished). The work remained among Monet’s family properties for many years and is now being offered by a prestigious private collection. This masterpiece makes its first appearance at auction and is one of the highlights of the sale at The Henderson on September 26.

It is one of Monet’s very first works to feature his beloved water lily pond at his home in Giverny, Normandy. Four other works from this pioneering Water Lilies series are now owned by as many renowned museums: the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Kagoshima City Museum of Art. In short, a painting of great rarity, and also of interesting size (73.3 x 101 cm). The estimate, therefore, can only be very high: from 200,000,000 to 280,000,000 Hong Kong dollars, or between 22.5 and 31.5 million euros. This is not a record figure, however, because Monet’s works in the past have also recorded double if not triple figures: the record belongs to the Haystacks sold in 2019 at Sotheby’s in New York, to the tune of $110 million, and a hypothetical €31.5 million sale would not even rank among Monet’s top five most expensive works: the father of Impressionism, however, is an artist who often smashed initial estimates ( Covoni themselves exactly doubled it, because they were starting from an estimate of 55 million).

The work going up for sale at Christie’s and the other seven paintings in Monet’s first Water Lilies series vary in format, size, color, and handling, as Monet loved to delight in the myriad pictorial potential of this new subject. The Water Lilies immerse the viewer in a colorful and shimmering aquatic world, and the work for sale belongs to the first series of Monet’s celebrated explorations of the water lily theme, explorations that would dominate his output in the 20th century. This painting introduces one of the most important and radical aspects of Monet’s Water Lilies: the elimination of the horizon line. His tightly focused scene brings the viewer to the center of the pond, removing all other peripheral details to focus entirely on the changing relationships between water, atmosphere, and light that transformed the surface of the pond with each passing moment. These painterly qualities would become central to each phase of Monet’s Water Lilies series and would be key influences for subsequent generations of artists.

“We are proud to present the auction debut of this Claude Monet masterpiece at Christie’s Inaugural Evening Sale at The Henderson,” says Cristian Albu, vice president and head of 20th and 21st century art at Christie’s Asia Pacific. "As one of the few remaining rare works from Monet’s pioneering first series of Water Lilies that is still in a private collection, while the others are in museums around the world, this painting is a truly unique treasure. With our unparalleled global expertise, we are privileged to present this seminal painting to our discerning collectors in Asia, meeting the growing demand for iconic Western artworks of the highest caliber."

"Claude Monet’s Water Lilies," adds Adrien Meyer, global head of private sales and co-chair of Impressionists and Modern Art at Christie’s, “are among the most influential images in the history of modern art. These Nymphéas reveal the pictorial innovations that would define his celebrated series. Presented for the first time at auction, it is no wonder that half of the paintings in this early series are already held in public institutions.”

A precious canvas from Monet's Water Lilies series goes up for auction at Christie's

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