Claude Monet’s Water Lily paintings are among the most valuable in art history. This September, one of them will be sold in Hong Kong with the potential to be among the the most valuable pieces of Western art ever sold in East Asia.
The painting, called Nympheas (1897 – 99), will be auctioned by Christie’s on September 26.
It carries an estimate of around $25 million to $35 million.
The Water Lilies sequence by Claude Money (1840 – 1926) has around 250 paintings. They were made in his garden at Giverny in the final decades of his life.
Claude Monet, around 1920, working on a water lily painting in his studio.
Many of the Water Lilies sequence are in museum collections. A permanent pavillion in the Musee de l’Orangerie holds a set of murals in the series owned by the French state. Others can be seen in MOMA, New York, Paris’s Musee d’Orsay, the Tate in London, and the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff.
Those in private hands are extremely valuable. This example was in the Monet family for decades and is now being sold by a private collector.
In 2007, a water lily painting was sold for £18.5 million in London. The following year another realised nearly £41 million. In 2014 examples were sold for $27 million in New York and $54 million in London.
The decision to sell this example in Hong Kong is seen as a vote of confidence in the East Asian art market by Christie’s. It will mark the opening of their new Hong Kong head quarters, which will be followed by openings in the Chinese region by Phillips and Sotheby’s.
Currently, the most valuable Western piece sold in East Asia was Warrior, a 1982 by Jean-Michel Basquiat. That realised $41.7 million in 2021. Zao Wou-ki’s Juin-Octobre 1985 realised $65.2 million at a Sotheby’s sale in Hong Kong in 2018.
Monet is both highly collectible and enjoys a wide public following. Original works are hugely expensive, and one of his haystack paintings (another long, thematic sequence) sold for over $110 million in 2019, a record for an Impressionist work.
