For the first time in 97 years, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La femme aux lilas (Portrait de Nini Lopez) will hit the auction block, with an estimate of $25 million to $35 million.
Set for Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale on May 18, the 1876–77 painting depicts Nini Lopez, a young Parisian actress, as a golden-haired woman with milky-pale skin and ruddy cheeks gazing into the distance, as she clasps a bouquet of white and pink flowers.
The painting has a unique provenance: since 1929, it has been owned by the Whitney Payson family, a historic American family that Max Carter, Christie’s global chairman of 20th- and 21st-century art, described to the New York Post as “one of the greatest, if not the greatest, American collecting family over the 20th century.”
The painting was purchased for $100,000 in 1929 by Joan Whitney Payson and her husband, Charles Payson. The work was one of the first pieces Whitney Payson bought, as she went on to build one of the most storied collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, as well as founding the New York Mets baseball club. Her collection is now on permanent loan to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.
The painting has stayed in the family ever since, passing to her daughter Lorinda Payson de Roulet, who died last November at the age of 95, reported the New York Times. During the 20th Century Evening Sale, Christie’s will be auctioning off nine pieces from de Roulet’s art collection, the Post reported.
Whitney Payson and de Roulet were far from the only art collectors in the family. Whitney Payson’s aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, wife of businessman Harry Payne Whitney, daughter of quintessential Gilded Age railroad titan Cornelius Vanderbilt II, was the namesake and founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Notably, another Renoir from the same time period and also purchased in 1929 by a member of the family, John Hay Whitney, set the artist’s auction record in 1990. The painting, Au Moulin de la Galette (1876), since renamed Bal du Moulin de la Galette, sold for $78.1 million at Sotheby’s New York in 1990 to Japanese businessman Ryoei Saito. That record has yet to be broken.
While Christie’s curators have described the painting as “the most important Renoir to come to market in decades,” it is unlikely La femme aux lilas will come close to Renoir’s auction record, with an estimate topping out at $35 million.
