Claude Monet’s Nymphéas (1897–99) is set to headline the inaugural sale at Christie’s new Zaha Hadid-designed Hong Kong headquarters on September 26. With an estimate of between HK$200 million and HK$280 million ($25 million – $35 million), the work is poised to become one of the most expensive artworks ever sold in Asia. Should the final sale price exceed the high estimate, Nymphéas could end up topping the list of the most expensive Western artworks ever sold in Asia, which currently includes Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Warrior ($41.7 million at Christie’s Hong Kong in 2021) and his 1985 Untitled ($37.3 million at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2021) along with Amedeo Modigliani’s Paulette Jourdain ($35 million at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2023).
It’s unlikely to surpass the record set by Nymphéas en fleur, which sold for $84.7 million—the highest sum ever realized by Monet’s water lilies—at Christie’s New York in 2018 but not outside the realm of possibility, given the ongoing expansion of the Asian market for art coupled with a wealthy collector base that has shown itself to have a hearty appetite for European modern and contemporary masterpieces.
This is the first time the painting, which was held by the Monet family before entering a private collection, has come to auction. Nymphéas (French for water lilies, depicted here in a tightly focused tableau rendered in a calm palette of greens, blues and purples) represents one of the earliest iterations of the motif that would occupy the artist from roughly 1897 to his death in 1926. According to the auction house, the painting introduces “one of the most important and radical aspects of Monet’s Nymphéas,” the elimination of a grounding horizon line as a means of focusing on the relationships between color, light and subject—a quality that would become central to the series.
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“The water flowers are far from being the whole spectacle; indeed, they are only its accompaniment,” Monet explained in a posthumously published interview. “The basic element of the motif is the mirror of water, whose appearance changes at every instant because of the way bits of the sky are reflected in it, giving it life and movement.”
All told, the prolific Impressionist painter created more than 250 paintings of the lilies in the pond at his home in Giverny. Four works from this particular early Nymphéas series of eight paintings are currently in the collections of museums: the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Kagoshima City Museum of Art and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. In a statement, Cristian Albu, head of 20th/21st Century Art at Christie’s Asia Pacific, called the work “a true singular treasure,” as it is one of the few remaining works from Monet’s first water lilies series not in a museum.
The auction of Nymphéas coincides with the 150th anniversary of Impressionism, the artistic movement whose founding is generally attributed to Monet and is named for his work Impression, soleil levant.