Christie’s to Offer $35 M. Renoir Painting Owned by Whitney Family

Pierre-Auguste Renoir for the first time in 97 years La femme aux lilas (portrait of Nini Lopez) It’s up for auction with an estimate of $25 million to $35 million.

The 1876-77 painting, which will be on display in Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale on May 18, depicts the young Parisian actress Nini Lopez, a blonde, fair-skinned woman with rosy cheeks, holding a bouquet of white and pink flowers and gazing into the distance.

The painting has a unique provenance: Since 1929, it has been owned by the Whitney Payson family, a long-established American family, as Max Carter, Christie’s global chairman of 20th and 21st century art, described the family to The New York Times. new york post Known as “one of the greatest American collecting families of the 20th century”.

In 1929, Joan Whitney Payson and her husband Charles Payson purchased the painting for $100,000. This work was one of the first works purchased by Whitney Person, who went on to build one of the most renowned collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art and founded the New York Mets baseball club. Her collection is now on permanent loan to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.

The painting has reportedly remained in the family ever since and was passed down to her daughter Lorinda Payson de Roulet, who died last November at the age of 95. new york times. During its 20th Century Evening Sale, Christie’s will offer nine works from the de Roulet art collection, postal the report said.

Whitney Payson and de Roulet are not the only art collectors in their family. Whitney Payson’s aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, was the wife of businessman Harry Penn Whitney, the daughter of quintessential Gilded Age railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt II, and the namesake and founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

It is worth noting that another Renoir work from the same period, also purchased by family member John Hay Whitney in 1929, set an auction record for the artist in 1990. pancake mill (1876), since the name change pancake mill ballroomsold to Japanese businessman Ryoei Saito at Sotheby’s New York in 1990 for US$78.1 million. This record has yet to be broken.

While Christie’s curators describe the painting as “the most important Renoir to come to the market in decades,” it’s unlikely that lilac girl The work will approach Renoir’s auction record, with an estimate of up to $35 million.