Monet's Iris could fetch $34 million and break France's auction record

Sotheby's Paris is preparing to auction a never-before publicly shown Claude Monet painting in October, carrying an estimate of 22 to 30 million euros, or roughly $25 to $34 million. The house says the work is positioned to break France's auction record for a sold painting.

The canvas belongs to Monet's Iris series, painted between 1914 and 1917 and again in 1924 and 1925, and shows purple and yellow irises reflecting on water. Monet completed it one year before his death in 1926, making it one of his final works.

At 63 by 71 inches, it is the largest example of the Iris series to reach the market and the largest painting from Monet's final years still in private hands. Sotheby's senior international specialist Thomas Bompard said demand for Monet's late works has never been this high.

Bompard pointed to the artist's auction record itself as evidence: five of Monet's top prices ever paid come from paintings made after 1914, the period this Iris belongs to. The sale takes place on October 22 as part of a 28-lot Impressionist and Modern sale.

That sale, titled Le Temps Retrouve: The Schlumberger Collection, carries a combined estimate of more than $45 million across its lots. The timing coincides with the centenary of Monet's death, marked by a run of exhibitions and by Art Basel Paris.

Another Monet in the same sale, Saule pleureur, painted in 1918 and 1919 in an autumnal palette after the First World War, carries a separate estimate of 9 to 12 million euros, or about $10 to $13.9 million.

The collection also includes an early Paul Cezanne landscape triptych, Paysage romantique aux pecheurs, painted between 1862 and 1864 for the artist's family estate, Jas de Bouffan, in southern France. It is estimated at roughly 400,000 euros, about $460,000.

That Cezanne has been designated a French national treasure, which gives the French state 30 months to attempt to acquire it before it can leave the country. No such restriction has been placed on the Monet works in the sale.

Two women behind the collection

The paintings trace to Jeanne Schlumberger, an heiress to the Schlumberger oil fortune who lived from 1889 to 1983, and to the art dealer Katia Granoff, who advised her. Bompard described Schlumberger as independent and private, someone who avoided vaunting her holdings to Parisian society.

Granoff made what Bompard called a bold decision: she secured a trove of Monet's later Giverny-period works directly from the artist's son, Michel, at a time when few in France wanted them. She risked everything she owned to buy his studio holdings.

Schlumberger provided additional financial backing for that purchase, and the two women then divided the paintings between themselves. Bompard called them independent and very clever, noting Schlumberger came from a family of engineers and was among the first French women to hold a driving license.

She reportedly loved driving sports cars but hated public attention, which is why so much of her collection stayed out of sight for decades. Bompard said only her closest circle ever saw the paintings, even though she was a generous patron to several museums.

Bompard summarized their partnership in a statement: Schlumberger and Granoff recognized the radical brilliance of these works when many still overlooked them, one collecting and the other championing, both trusting instinct when the wider art world had already made up its mind.

What the sale would join in the record books

We have tracked comparable single-owner sales before: the Sonnabend Collection carried a $50 million estimate heading to Christie's, a similar scale of trove built by collectors with an eye ahead of the market. The Schlumberger sale follows that same pattern of a hidden collection surfacing in one event.

Provenance has repeatedly driven prices well past estimates in categories we track closely. Among finished jewelry, the record realized price belongs to Marie Antoinette's natural pearl and diamond pendant at $36.2 million, a case where a royal owner's name, not the stones themselves, set the price.

We have found the same pattern away from paintings and gems: the record for sneakers, an $8 million price for six pairs of Michael Jordan's championship Air Jordans sold together as a set, rested on the nights he wore them rather than on the shoes.

A Monet withheld from public view for most of a century by a collector who refused to show her holdings carries that same weight of story alongside the canvas itself, and it is the combination Sotheby's is betting will push the Iris toward its $34 million ceiling on October 22.