Sotheby's Employees carry Edouard Manet's 'Self-Portrait with a Palette' at Sotheby's in London...

Last evening's much-anticipated sale of Impressionist & Modern Art at Sotheby's in London brought a within-estimate total of £112,101,350 /$165,282,230 / €134,409,672. Three works sold for more than £10 million, only the second time this has happened in London auction history: Edouard Manet's museum- quality masterpiece Self Portrait with a Palette sold for £22,441,250 ($33,087,379 / €26,907,089), setting a new auction record for the artist; André Derain's Arbres à Collioure, from the Vollard trove, made £16,281,250 ($24,005,075/€19,521,241), double the previous record for the artist and a record for any Fauve painting at auction; and Henri Matisse's Odalisques jouant aux dames brought £11,801,250 /$17,399,763 / €14,149,715. The sale attracted buyers from no fewer than 13 countries; of the lots sold, over 50% achieved prices in excess of the high estimate; and the average lot value for the works sold reached an exceptional £3.2 million. The sum achieved tonight brings the total of Impressionist & Modern Art sold by Sotheby's London so far in 2010 to an unprecedented £276 million.
Edouard Manet's Self Portrait with a Palette:
Self Portrait with a Palette, a rare, museum-quality work of 1878/9 by Edouard Manet, the father of Impressionism, sold this evening to an anonymous bidder for a record £22,441,250 ($33,087,379 / €26,907,089), eclipsing the previous record of $26m/£16m, which had stood unchallenged for the last 21 years. The price achieved tonight is almost double that realized by the same painting when it sold in the famous Loeb Collection sale in 1997 for $18.7m.

For all results of the Impressionists evening sale click here.

Published 23.06.2010