Monet’s €30M Iris Estimate Is Not France’s Auction Record

Sotheby’s has unveiled Claude Monet’s monumental Iris (1924–25) with a €22 million–€30 million estimate for an October 22 sale in Paris. The house calls that France’s highest auction estimate for a painting, and The Art Newspaper says the work could set a national sale record. A documented 1989 Paris auction, however, produced both a higher estimate and a higher result.

 
 

What Sotheby’s Is Offering on October 22

The 160-by-180-centimeter oil belongs to Monet’s final decade at Giverny. Sotheby’s says it is the largest canvas from the artist’s Iris group ever to reach the market and that it had never been publicly exhibited before its September 17 presentation in Paris.

Iris leads 28 works from Jeanne Schlumberger’s collection, which Sotheby’s values at more than €40 million in total. Three other Monets are included, among them Saule pleureur (1918–19), estimated at €9 million–€12 million. According to EFE’s account of the presentation, Sotheby’s described both major Monets as unlined and unvarnished; that is the auction house’s condition claim, not an independent conservation report.

The house has attached no guarantee to any lot, The Art Newspaper reported. That leaves the final level to bidding rather than a prearranged minimum payment from Sotheby’s or a third party. It also makes the estimate a market test, not a result.

Infographic by Art in Context, based on EFE, Le Monde.

 
 

France’s 1989 Picasso Sale Changes the Record Claim

The unqualified claim that €22 million–€30 million is France’s highest estimate for an auction painting does not survive the historical record. The Musée national Picasso-Paris archive maintains a dedicated file for the November 30, 1989 public sale of Pablo Picasso’s Les Noces de Pierrette. A contemporaneous Le Monde report says the painting was estimated at 300 million–400 million French francs and knocked down for 300 million francs at Drouot-Montaigne in Paris. Le Monde explicitly called it a record sale in France.

The European Commission’s fixed conversion rate is €1 to 6.55957 French francs. On that official conversion, the 1989 estimate equals approximately €45.735 million–€60.980 million, while the hammer price equals €45.735 million. A later Le Monde account records 314.9 million francs with fees, equivalent to about €48.006 million. These are nominal conversions, not inflation adjustments.

Paris painting sale	Hammer	With fees
Picasso, Les Noces de Pierrette (1989)	FRF 300m (€45.735m equivalent)	FRF 314.9m (€48.006m equivalent)
Picasso, Buste de femme au chapeau à fleurs (2025)	€27m	€32,012,397
Bidding for Chardin’s Le Melon entamé reached €23 million at the hammer and €26.73 million with fees in 2024, but the buyer defaulted and the auction sale did not proceed.

Because the 1989 auction was linked with a room in Tokyo, a narrowly defined ranking might choose a different geography. But Le Monde located the adjudication at Drouot-Montaigne and called it a French record, while the Picasso museum files it as the November 30 public sale. Sotheby’s published claim supplied no euro-era or single-room qualification in the accounts released on September 17. Without such a qualification, the 1989 sale is the benchmark.

 

Related work: Claude Monet, The Path through the Irises (1914–17), Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is not the painting offered by Sotheby’s. Image hosted by Wikimedia Commons under the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication; cropped.

 
 

What Iris Would Actually Need to Make

Auction language creates a second complication. A hammer price is the winning bid; a price “with fees” adds the buyer’s premium and possibly other charges. Sotheby’s guide says presale estimates exclude the premium, overhead premium, taxes and any applicable resale royalty. Its current Paris premium schedule charges 28% on the first €1.75 million, 22% from €1.75 million to €7 million and 15% above €7 million, before local taxes.

The all-time nominal tests are therefore more than €45.735 million at the hammer and more than €48.006 million in the published premium-inclusive result. Reaching the hammer benchmark would require Iris to exceed its €30 million high estimate by about €15.735 million, or 52%.

For comparison, the Associated Press recorded a €27 million hammer and €32,012,397 with fees for Picasso’s Buste de femme au chapeau à fleurs in Paris in 2025. That is the recent euro-era benchmark. Applying only Sotheby’s published premium tiers to a €30 million hammer produces about €35.095 million before taxes or other charges: enough to pass the 2025 result, but well short of the converted 1989 total.

 
 

From Monet’s Studio to the Schlumberger Home

The provenance sequence is Monet’s studio, his son Michel Monet, dealer Katia Granoff and then Jeanne Schlumberger’s collection. A scholarly Art Institute of Chicago record confirms that Michel inherited the studio after Monet’s death in 1926 and explains that he probably worked with Granoff to stamp unsigned late canvases leaving the estate. The auction painting then remained in the Schlumberger family’s Paris residence until the present sale, according to Sotheby’s account relayed by multiple outlets.

The transaction’s date and financing are not settled in the published accounts. The Art Newspaper places Granoff’s acquisition of Michel’s studio holdings in 1958 and says Jeanne Schlumberger backed it by using her house as collateral. Artnet gives 1956, while EFE attributes the support to Jean Schlumberger. They agree on the material point: Granoff supplied access to Monet’s late studio works, and the Schlumberger collection acquired Iris through that relationship.

That chain matters because the canvas was not circulating through repeated auctions or exhibitions. Sotheby’s says it was known publicly only through a black-and-white photograph before September 17. Its color, surface and large scale are consequently entering public assessment at the same moment as its valuation.

Claude Monet in his studio, 1926. Agence de presse Meurisse/Bibliothèque nationale de France, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain; cropped.

 
 

Why a Once-Unfashionable Late Monet Now Commands the Estimate

Within the wider arc of Claude Monet’s paintings, the late garden canvases remove the stable horizon and let brushwork spread across almost the entire field. Like Monet’s Water Lilies, the irises grew from the garden he designed at Giverny, but they let upright leaves and flowers interrupt the reflected surface.

The Royal Academy of Arts’ visit to Giverny makes that source visible: the flowerbeds and paths were not generic scenery but a cultivated working environment that Monet repeatedly reorganized in paint.

The Art Institute’s study of its own Irises supplies firm evidence for the reversal in taste. Its canvas was unsigned and undated, carried later estate stamps and was built in multiple wet-over-dry layers. Technical imaging found that Monet may have painted out earlier water lilies. The museum says reception of the late work was initially lukewarm, then identifies the Museum of Modern Art’s purchase of a mural-scale composition in 1955 as the event that accelerated American interest; the Art Institute bought its Irises in 1956.

That history makes Granoff and Schlumberger’s early commitment more than a colorful provenance story. They were buying the very features—scale, dense surface and reduced separation between object and reflection—that museums and collectors later treated as the late work’s modernity. The Art Newspaper reports that paintings made after 1914 now account for five of Monet’s ten highest auction prices. Artnet’s database puts the existing auction record for an iris-themed Monet at £10.8 million, achieved in London in 2015, so the Paris estimate still represents a major test for this motif even though it is not France’s all-time estimate record.

Claude Monet, Irises (1914–17), Art Institute of Chicago. Image via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0; cropped.

 
 

The 1989 Picasso Benchmark Remains Higher

The key figures are:

• Iris is scheduled for October 22 with a €22 million–€30 million estimate; no sale record has yet been achieved.
• Picasso’s 1989 Paris sale had a higher estimate and reached the equivalent of €45.735 million hammer and €48.006 million with fees.
• Iris would have to exceed its high estimate by roughly 52% to take the nominal hammer record.
• The Monet provenance sequence is consistent, but current accounts conflict over the studio transaction’s year and financier.
• The buyer, hammer price and final price will remain unknown until the October 22 auction concludes.