A Monet Nobody Had Seen: What the €50m *Iris* Tells Us About Late Monet

On Thursday evening, in a saleroom on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, a painting that had spent a century hidden in a Paris townhouse became the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction in France. Claude Monet’s Iris (1924–25) fetched €50m with fees, roughly $56m, at Sotheby’s Paris. It had been estimated at €22m to €30m.

The headline figure is striking, but the more interesting story is the picture itself, and what it says about how our view of Monet has changed.

A century behind closed doors

Iris, billed as the grandest of Monet’s paintings of the irises in his garden at Giverny, measures around 1.6 by 1.8 metres. It came from the collection of Jeanne Schlumberger, an heir to the Schlumberger oil fortune, and according to Sotheby’s it had never left the family’s Paris mansion. Scholars knew it only from a black-and-white photograph. Thursday’s pre-sale viewing was, in effect, its public debut.

That rarity drove the bidding. Six collectors competed for close to 45 minutes before the painting went to a telephone buyer in Asia, represented by Jen Hua, deputy chairman of Sotheby’s Asia. The wider sale of 27 works from the Schlumberger collection, including three further Monets, sold every lot, with three-quarters finishing above their high estimates. The evening totalled €74.4m, against a pre-sale estimate of around €40m.

It is worth keeping the record in proportion. The previous French auction high was Modigliani’s Head of a Caryatid, sold for €43.2m in 2010. Adjust for inflation, and the title arguably still belongs to Picasso’s Les Noces de Pierrette, which made 314.9m francs at Drouot in 1989, a sum The Art Newspaper calculates at more than €100m in today’s money. And Monet’s own auction record remains the $110.7m paid for one of his Meules (haystacks) in New York in 2019. Iris is a French record, not a world-beater. But in a market that has spent two years talking about caution, a near-doubling of the low estimate is a statement.

The painter who nearly went blind

What makes Iris matter is its date. By the mid-1920s Monet was in his eighties, recovering from cataract surgery and working obsessively on the great water lily panels he would give to the French state. His eyesight had distorted his sense of colour for years; at times he relied on the labels on his paint tubes.

The paintings from this final decade are loose, thick, sometimes violent things. Petals dissolve into strokes of violet and ochre, and the ground plane all but disappears. For decades after his death in 1926, many critics regarded this work as the product of failing sight and old age, a sad coda to Impressionism.

That changed after the Second World War. As American painters such as Jackson Pollock and Joan Mitchell pushed towards abstraction, curators began to see the late Monet not as a decline but as a prophecy. Huge, all-over canvases with no fixed horizon suddenly looked remarkably modern. The Museum of Modern Art in New York bought a large water lily panel in the 1950s, and the reassessment has continued ever since. Thursday’s result is, in part, the market catching up with that art-historical shift: the late, wild Monet is now among the most coveted Monet of all.

Where to see late Monet in the UK

You do not need €50m, or a ticket to Paris, to stand in front of this kind of painting. The National Gallery in London has owned a late Irises, painted around 1914–17, since 1967; it is two metres tall and seems to look down on the flowerbed from the Japanese bridge (check the gallery’s website before you go, as it is not always on display). Look at how little of it describes a flower in any botanical sense; the subject is almost an excuse for colour and gesture. Compare it with The Water-Lily Pond of 1899, with its neat Japanese bridge, to see how far Monet travelled in under twenty years.

Further afield, the National Museum Cardiff, home to the Davies sisters’ bequest, has one of Britain’s strongest Impressionist collections outside London, including Monet’s water lilies. Free entry at both makes a slow, repeated look entirely possible.

Why this matters beyond the saleroom

There is a broader lesson here for anyone who loves art rather than simply follows prices. Reputations are not fixed. Work that one generation dismisses as clumsy or unfinished can become, to the next, the most exciting thing an artist ever made. Late Monet is the classic example, but the same process is happening right now, in independent galleries across the country, where artists who do not yet fit the prevailing taste are quietly making the work that may define the period.

The Schlumberger Iris will now most likely disappear into another private collection, possibly for decades. That is the nature of the market. But its brief moment in public is a good excuse to go and look at the late Monets that belong to all of us, and to ask, in front of a living artist’s work, whether we are seeing it clearly or only through the habits of our own time.