‘Meule’ Becomes The Most Expensive Monet Panting with $81.4 Million
There has been a record sale of $81.4 million for Monet painting at Christie’s Auction, and the ‘Meule’ becomes the Most Expensive Monet Panting.
I have to admit that I had a slow day today without any inspiration whatsoever. Then I turned to the internet and found what it was missing.
Back in the day, when the inspiration ran out, people didn’t have internet so they turned to the people they admired for inspiration. That’s Claude Monet’s case. When he was younger, a teenager, he got inspired to start painting by landscape artist Eugène Boudin.
“It was as if a veil was torn from my eyes,” wrote the artist who would later become the father of Impressionism. “I had gasped what painting could be.”
If you know Monet you noticed that his signature is to paint the same scenes over and over again to capture changing light, seasons, and weather.
One collection of those works, Haystacks, is a series of 25 canvases painted between 1890 and 1891, showing a field of haystacks in the French countryside.
One of those 25 canvases, a coveted canvas from the collection, Meule, was sold at Christie’s New York City auction after an intense 14-minute-bidding-war.
Monet painted about 25 of the grain stack canvases in the early 1890s, of which 19 are in public museum collections, according to Christie’s.
They wanted the painting so bad that its price just went over the roof at $81.4 million. That’s one million more than any other Monet painting ever sold at auction.
The roughly 28-by-36-inch painting of a grainstack containing all purples, pinks, blues, and reds against a blazing horizon was painted in 1891.
Christie’s told press that the work’s estimate, available on request, was in the region of $45 million, but it easily surpassed that, going for $81.4 million after more than 14 minutes of bidding.
This particular Monet had last appeared at an auction at Sotheby’s New York in May 1999, where it sold for $11.8 million.
The previous owner of the painting was stock picker Tom Marsico, who has owned the Monet pink-and-purple painting of a grainstack for over 14 years. He purchased it in 2002 and paid $12 million for it.
The 1891 canvas, which was won by an anonymous collector bidding over the telephone, was only expected to sell for around $45 million.
The previous record for a Monet was $80.4 million, set by a “Water Lily Pond” that sold at Christie’s eight years ago.
The 1891 canvas, “Meule,” lifted Christie’s Impressionist and modern art evening sale to $246.3 million, a 69 percent jump from the similar auction a year ago.
With all that being said, we must end our story here for now. Because no one known when another painting by Monet is going to surface and break the actual record as the most expensive Monet painting.
Would you have paid $81.4 million for Monet’s painting?Tell us in the comments!
