LONDON.- Two exceptional works by Claude Monet, painted nearly four decades apart, will headline Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary Evening auction in London on 24 June. Together, the paintings encapsulate both the origins and culmination of Monet’s revolutionary artistic practice, drawing on two of his most enduring sources of inspiration: his water garden at Giverny, and his beloved wife Camille.

Leading the sale is Nymphéas (1907), a lyrically ethereal and luminous view of Monet’s famed water lily pond at Giverny, carrying the highest estimate ever placed on a work by the artist to come to auction in Europe (est. £30–40m). It is joined by Camille assise sur la plage à Trouville, an intimate early portrait of Monet’s beloved wife Camille on the Normandy coast during the summer of 1870 (est. £7–10m).

Offered from the same private collection, the two paintings share distinguished American provenance. Nymphéas remained in the collection of renowned patron and collector Anne Bass for nearly four decades, while Camille assise sur la plage à Trouville formerly belonged to Peggy and David Rockefeller. Having resided in major American collections for generations, both works will now be presented in London for the first time.

Seen together, the paintings offer a compelling through-line across Monet’s artistic evolution — one that would ultimately set to alter the course of art history. Painted on the cusp of Impressionism, the Trouville portrait captures a fleeting, wind-swept moment with striking immediacy, while Nymphéas, executed at the height of Monet’s powers, reflects his profound reimagining of landscape, light, and perception.

Together with the Lewis Collection and other major works, this remarkable pairing arrives at a defining moment for the London art market, bringing an exceptional concentration of museum-quality works to auction, including some of the highest-value works ever offered in Europe presented under one roof.

CLAUDE MONET
Nymphéas (1907)
Estimate: £30–40 million

Painted at a landmark moment during Monet's career, Nymphéas belongs to the pivotal group of water lily paintings executed between 1904 and 1909, a period during which the artist radically transformed the language of landscape painting. Dispensing with the horizon line and dissolving spatial boundaries, Monet rendered the surface of his pond as a boundless field of light, colour, and reflection.

His water garden at Giverny offered an infinite array of shifting effects and hence, for the artist, an inexhaustible source of inspiration, presenting subtle tensions between surface and depth, near and far, permanence and transience — all unified within an ever-changing, luminous atmosphere.

Nymphéas is executed in the highly coveted square format, a compositional innovation that proved critical to Monet’s artistic evolution. By renouncing traditional landscape and portrait orientations, he abolished the horizon line entirely, intensifying the immersive, near-abstract quality of his water lilies while enabling an intimate and contemplative focus on floating vegetation and rippling reflections. The work signals a decisive departure from traditional landscape conventions and anticipates later developments in abstraction, exerting a profound influence on generations of artists, including figures such as Mark Rothko, whose work will be exhibited alongside this canvas in the sale.

Softly atmospheric and richly textured, the composition captures the delicate interplay between floating blossoms, reflected sky, and rippling water, blurring the distinction between the tangible and the ephemeral.

CLAUDE MONET
Camille assise sur la plage à Trouville (1870)
Estimate: £7–10 million

Painted at a formative moment in the emergence of Impressionism, this intimate portrait of Camille Monet, the artist’s beloved first wife, stands as a striking example of the artist’s pioneering plein air practice, distinguished by its immediacy, spontaneity, and freshness of execution.

Works depicting Monet’s first wife are exceptionally rare: this is one of only a small handful of such portraits ever to appear at auction. The painting has never been exhibited or offered for sale in the UK and has been shown publicly only once, in Paris in 1970.

Unlike most of Monet’s coastal scenes of the 1860s, which focus on maritime activity, this composition captures a quiet, personal moment, elevating the everyday into something profoundly modern. It remained in Monet’s possession until 1875, when it was acquired by the poet and critic Émile Blémont, an early advocate of Impressionism.

Painted in the summer of 1870, on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War, the scene is notably untouched by the political turbulence of the moment. Shortly thereafter, Monet fled to London with Camille and their son, taking works from this pivotal period with him.