One of Claude Monet’s paintings of London’s Charing Cross Bridge is expected to fetch between $20 million and $30 million at a Sotheby’s evening auction, in New York, on November 12.
The auction will showcase Impressionist and Modern art from various private collections. Other prominent lots include works by Marc Chagall, René Magritte and Pablo Picasso.
Monet is understood to have painted approximately 100 paintings of various sites in London during his visits between 1899-1905. Although there are 37 renditions of the Charing Cross Bridge itself, this version is still on the lower end of Monet’s auction record.
This March, a Monet painting of Charing Cross Bridge reportedly changed hands in a private transaction in the UK for $63 million.
Further, many editions of Charing Cross Bridge are held in the collections of institutions such as Art Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. According to Sotheby’s, those held in private hands rarely appear at auction.
After holding steady at $80.3 million from 2008 to 2016, new top prices for Monet’s paintings have been achieved three times in the past three years. The current record stands at $110.7 million for one in his series of paintings of haystacks, Meules, bought at a Sotheby’s New York auction this May.
