Last evening a painting by Claude Monet shattered auction records at Sotheby’s impressionist and modern art evening sale in New York when it sold for $110.7 million—double its pre-auction estimate of $55 million. Meules is one of 25 works existing from the artist’s Haystacks series and one of only eight left in private hands; the rest have been placed in museum collections, which include those of the Musée D’Orsay in Paris and MoMA in New York. The work not only surpassed the artist’s previous auction record—$84.7 million, set last May for his Nympheas en Fleur—but also is the first painting from the Impressionist movement to surpass $100 million. Meules also now holds the title of the ninth most expensive work to ever sell at auction.
“One of the most recognizable images in art history, Claude Monet’s Haystacks series has long served as an inspiration to countless artists since its creation in the early 1890s. It was a true honor to present Meules among a remarkable group of Impressionist pictures emerging from the same distinguished private collection—one of several important collections offered tonight that propelled our results,” said August Uribe, Sotheby’s head of impressionist and modern art in New York, in a statement to the press.
Monet created his Haystacks series between 1880 and 1891 in the fields beside his home in Giverny, in Northern France. In an art historical context, the group represents the first time he painted the same subject multiple times under different lighting and atmospheric conditions in different seasons—something he would go on to do with other series. He was particularly taken by the haystacks and the surrounding landscape in Giverny, and the sensitive changes in light throughout the day was a theme he studied throughout much of his work. This particular painting features multiple stacks and is painted with a vibrancy that scholars say distinguishes it from the rest of Haystacks. “They’re so evocative, so romantic, and so easy to live with,” Offer Waterman, a London-based dealer, told The New York Times. “That was the best of the series that’s come up for auction. It was an amazing painting. And you just can’t get them.”
