At its June 24 modern and contemporary art sale, Sotheby’s London will offer two Monets—one depicting the famed water lily pond on his estate, the other a portrait of his wife—that have previously passed through the hands of top collectors. Both come from the same unnamed seller, and are coming back to the market just a few years after they last appeared at auction.
Nymphéas (1907), estimated at £30 to £40 million ($40 to $53.5 million), was once in the collection of collector Anne Bass, while Camille assise sur la plage à Trouville (1870–71), estimated at £7 to £10 million ($9.4 to $13.4 million), passed through the collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller.
At a Christie’s New York sale of Bass’s collection in 2022, Nymphéas fetched $56.5 million—notably more than its current estimate. Billionaire Sid Richardson Bass amassed his wealth in the oil industry and later became a major Disney shareholder. He ranked on the annual ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list between 1990 and 1992. Anne, his wife, was a philanthropist, socialite, and art collector who ranked on the annual ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list between 1990 and 1994.
The nearly nine-foot-high canvas has been on public view just twice, in Paris in 1909 at Durand-Ruel Galerie and in New York in 2010. On the occasion of that 1909 show, writer Jean-Louis Vaudoyer noted that “Here, more than ever before, painting approached music and poetry.”
Claude Monet, Nymphéas (1907).
Sotheby's.
The Frenchman’s auction record is $110.7 million, achieved with Sotheby’s New York’s 2019 sale of his Meules (1891), which set a record for any Impressionist painting. Another nearly-square painting of water lilies, Nymphéas en fleur (ca. 1914–1917), from the Rockefellers’ collection, ranks as his second-highest price; it fetched $84.7 million at Christie’s New York in 2018. Some 14 Monet canvases have exceeded $50 million at auction since 2008. Nine of those depict water lilies.
“This is from his peak period of the classic square- or almost-square-format water lilies series, that spans the period from 1904 to 1909,” Helena Newman, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe and chairman of Impressionist and modern art worldwide, told ARTnews. “He goes right into the surface of the pond and focuses on the water as a reflection of the sky, stripping away the bank, so that it begins to verge on pure abstraction. And it has a gorgeous palette, with everything that you can hope for in terms of the variation of pigment.”
Claude Monet, Camille assise sur la plage à Trouville (1870–71).
Sotheby's.
The painting of Camille has never been exhibited or offered for sale in the UK. According to the auctioneer’s research, just one other painting of the artist’s wife has ever come to auction. This one, measuring about four feet high, sold at Sotheby’s in 2000 for $2.3 million, and again at Christie’s historic Rockefeller sale in 2018, for $12.1 million. For that sale, the auction house achieved white-glove status, tallying $646.1 million, far outstripping the $490 million presale estimate and shattering the long-standing record for a single-session, single-owner sale.
“It’s a painting you would think is in a museum,” said Newman of the Camille canvas, and not for nothing: other renditions of his wife on the same beach reside in the Musée Marmottan in Paris, the National Gallery in London, and the Yale University Art Gallery.
“It dates from just before the famous Impression: Sunrise painting of 1874,” Newman noted. “It was painted on the cusp of the Franco-Prussian war, yet they seem to have not a care in the world, and she looks like the ultimate fashionable Parisian lady.”
“To have the seller consign these two canvases, spanning key moments in Monet’s career,” said Newman, “is a vote of confidence in the market and in London as a global venue for major sales.”
