A painting that no one outside a single French family has seen in over a century is about to become the most expensive work ever auctioned in France. Claude Monet's Iris, a monumental 160-by-180-centimetre oil on canvas painted at Giverny in 1924 and 1925, leads Sotheby's Paris evening sale on October 22 with an estimate of €22 million to €30 million (roughly $25 million to $34 million).
If it reaches the upper end, it will surpass the current French auction record: Modigliani's Elvire en buste, which sold for €27 million at Sotheby's Paris last November.
A century in private hands
The sale is titled Le Temps Retrouvé: The Schlumberger Collection, and the 28 lots in it tell the story of one collector's spectacularly unfashionable taste. Jeanne Schlumberger (1889 to 1983) was an heir to the Schlumberger oil fortune. She lived in an hôtel particulier on the rue Las-Cases in Paris, the kind of address where you might expect Renoir pastorals and tasteful bronzes. Instead, she collected Soutine, Rouault, and the enormous late Monets that most of the art world considered embarrassing.
"Jeanne was pretty wild," says Thomas Bompard, Sotheby's senior international specialist. "She had a visionary eye. She didn't like classic Impressionism, she liked Soutine and she liked the monumental late Monets, which were considered the first abstract paintings with their very gestural and dramatic brushstrokes of pure colour."
Bompard paints a picture of two women who saw what nobody else would. Beginning in the 1950s, Schlumberger worked closely with the Parisian dealer Katia Granoff, who had her own instinct for overlooked artists. "If you had met either Katia Granoff or Jeanne Schlumberger on the Rive Gauche in Paris in the 1960s, based on their outfits you might have guessed they were grand bourgeois women collecting Renoir, not prophets of abstract art," Bompard says.
The deal that changed everything
In 1958, Schlumberger put her own house up as collateral so that Granoff could acquire the studio holdings of Monet's son Michel, a transaction that handed Granoff a trove of unseen paintings from Monet's final years at Giverny, at a moment when those works attracted almost no enthusiasm in France. Granoff placed key pieces in American museums and private collections, gradually rehabilitating Monet's late reputation, and Schlumberger acquired Iris and Saule pleureur (a weeping willow scene, estimated at €9 million to €12 million in the same sale) for herself. "She knew when she bought those two extraordinary paintings that these kinds of Monets were not at all fashionable," Bompard says.
The total collection is expected to bring more than €40 million. None of the lots will carry guarantees.
What critics called "artistic suicide"
To understand why Schlumberger's bet was so contrarian, you need to know what people said about Monet's late paintings when they were first unveiled after his death on 5 December 1926. "When Monet died, the unveiling of his works was a big scandal," Bompard recalls. "Some critics said it was artistic suicide, that these were the works of a blind artist, or of a senile old man."
He was not far from blind. Monet had been battling bilateral cataracts since at least 1912, and by the early 1920s his vision had deteriorated so severely that he could barely distinguish colours; reds looked muddy to him, and his world was cast in a yellowish-brown fog. He resisted surgery for years, fearful of the outcome. When he finally submitted to a cataract operation in 1923, his colour perception returned, and Iris belongs to the brief, furious period of painting that followed: 1924 and 1925, the last two productive years before his death.
The painting is the largest work from Monet's Iris series ever to appear at auction. The earlier irises, painted between 1914 and 1917, were often composed from a high vantage point, sometimes from the Japanese bridge looking down. By 1924, the viewpoint had dropped to ground level, looking up into the flowers, giving the irises a towering, near-mythic scale.
Five of the ten highest auction prices ever achieved for a Monet are now for works painted after 1914, a statistic that would have baffled the critics who dismissed the late canvases as the output of a man who could no longer see. Schlumberger, it turns out, was not eccentric. She was early.
The paintings heading to the block on October 22 remain unlined, unvarnished, and untouched since they left Monet's studio. "When the stars are aligned like this," Bompard says, "guarantees are not a necessity." The sale coincides with the centenary of Monet's death and with a season of Monet exhibitions across Paris, including at the Musée de l'Orangerie, where his Nymphéas hang permanently in the oval rooms he helped design.
One hundred years after a half-blind painter loaded violet and amber onto a canvas that critics would call the work of a senile man, someone will raise a paddle in a Paris saleroom and pay more for it than any painting has ever fetched in France. (If you want to live with Impressionism for less than €22 million, Meron's Impressionist collection is a gentler entry point.)
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