Work From Monet’s ‘Water Lilies’ Sells For $43M

A work from Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies” series sold for more than $43 million at auction in New York City, with proceeds going to support the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York.

The Monet work dates from 1905 and is the year the French artist began his phase of depicting his garden’s lily pond in Giverny, France, reports The Washington Post.

Monet’s work from the “Water Lilies” series that sold at auction is considered among the best. The painting was from Ethel Strong Allen’s estate, who was the widow of Wall Street executive Herbert Allen Sr.

Allen bequeathed the Monet Water Lilies painting to the k-12 boarding school, along with works by Impressionist artists Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley. The works were sold by Christie’s auction house, who stated that the Monet work, which was sold on Wednesday, went to an anonymous American collector.

The Wall Street Journal notes that, along with the work from Monet’s Water Lilies series, which was the auction’s top seller at $43 million, Christie’s also earned $23 million for Wassily Kandinsky’s “Study for Improvisation 8.”

The Kandinsky work was published in 1909 and shows a man carrying a broadsword in a rainbow-hued village. It was previously on loan to the Art Museum in Winterthur, Switzerland. The work, which now represents the most expensive Kandinsky sold at auction, will go to a European collector from the Volkart Foundation.

Despite big works like Monet’s Water Lilies that sold for $43 million, the Christie’s sale fell short of its $209.2 million expectations and saw 21 of its 69 offerings go unsold. One of the unsold works was a Picasso bronze sculpture of a rooster, called “Coq,” which was priced at $10 million but received no bids.

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