At auction at Sotheby's is the largest version of Magritte's Empire of Lights. Estimated at more than $60 million

Going up for eveningauction at Sotheby’s in London on March 2 is one of René Magritte’s best-known masterpieces: a version of The Empire of Lights. The painting is estimated at more than $60 million. It is the largest version of the painting in horizontal format, an impressive 114.5 x 146 centimeters.

The work was created in 1961 for Baroness Anne-Marie Gillion Crowet, daughter of Magritte’s patron, Belgian surrealist collector Pierre Crowet, and has remained in the family ever since. “Look, I painted you even before I met you,” Magritte had told her, who had depicted in a series of completed works before their first meeting a female figure very much like her, because Anne-Marie embodied Magritte’s aesthetic ideal. She later became friends with the painter and his wife Georgette, appearing in many of the artist’s most significant paintings.

"A masterpiece of 20th-century art, The Empire of Lights brings together the two fundamental elements of everyday life, those of day and night, on a single canvas," commented Helena Newman, president of Sotheby’s Europe and Worldwide Head of Impressionist and Modern Art. “With its impressive scale, the painting draws the viewer in. Its immediacy and power encapsulate the ’star quality’ that places Magritte fully in the pantheon of the market’s most sought-after artists. We could not be more excited to begin the New Year by presenting this extraordinary work in London.”

Exhibited throughout Brussels, Rome, Paris, Vienna, Milan, Seoul, Edinburgh and San Francisco, The Empire of Lights was recently loaned to the Musée Magritte in Brussels from 2009 to 2020, surrounded by the finest collection of Magritte paintings in the world. Prior to the auction, the painting will be publicly displayed in Sotheby’s galleries in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, New York and London.

Magritte began the first version of this subject in 1948, returning to it several times over the following decades. The result was a group of seventeen paintings entitled The Empire of Lights. The first version was purchased by Nelson Rockefeller and examples are now held in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Menil Collection in Houston, and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels.

The subject may have been inspired by André Breton ’s poem L’Aigrette, which Magritte knew well, with the opening line, “If only the sun would come out tonight.” The mysterious combination of a dark street, at night, under a blue sky is typical of Magritte’s eerie surrealist images, in which two seemingly incompatible things coexist to create a false reality. The street portrayed could be a street near Parc Josaphat in Brussels, where the artist had moved in 1954.

Ph.Credit Sotheby’s

At auction at Sotheby's is the largest version of Magritte's Empire of Lights. Estimated at more than $60 million

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