Two Monet Paintings, Unseen for a Century, Resurface at Auction

In the spring of 1883, Claude Monet moved to Giverny, the bucolic village where he would spend the final four decades of his life. There, he continued his love affair with the Seine, paddling out in a customized studio boat and lending bob and flow to the meaning of plein air painting.
An early obsession was the thickly wooded islands stranded in the river across from Giverny. Monet painted them half a dozen times or so, offering blooms of mottled green rising out of the languid waters. One of these riverboat works is resurfacing at Sotheby’s Paris this April after being sequestered in a private collection for the past 115 years.

Previously known only through a black and white photograph from the 1950s, Les Îles de Port-Villez (1883) depicts the natural world untouched by man. One glance and you can feel the speed at which Monet worked in his boat. The focus is the billowing island and its reflection, which Monet builds with energetic, generous strokes of greens and blues. The hazy sky, by contrast, is almost an afterthought.
“Monet is like an explorer arriving in a new world and using his boat to be as free as possible,” Thomas Bompard, co-head of modern and contemporary art at Sotheby’s Paris, said over the phone. “He’s saying: ‘I am going to choose the part of the landscape that I want to paint, not the part that nature or some Impressionist code chooses.’ He really becomes the master of his aesthetic.” In color, technique, and intensity, it’s an aesthetic Bompard sees as foreshadowing Monet’s later fixation on water lilies.

Estimated at €3 million to €5 million ($3.5 million to $5.8 million), the painting was last seen on the walls of Paul Durand-Ruel’s enterprising Fifth Avenue gallery in the early 20th century—Durand-Ruel was an early Monet supporter and even lent the painter 20,000 francs (roughly $130,000 today) to buy his two-story Giverny dream house in 1890.
After news of Îles de Port-Villez’s consignment trickled through French collecting networks in January, a second long-held Monet emerged and will also be offered at Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary Sale on April 16.

That work is Vétheuil, Effet du Matin (1901), a pointillistic depiction of a valley Monet knew intimately. The painting of the village of Vétheuil as seen from across a broad sweep of the Seine has been given an estimate of €6 million to €8 million ($6.9 million to $9.2 million). Together, Bompard said, they are the most valuable Monet paintings to appear at auction in France since 2001.
Vétheuil was painted 18 years and one elongated bend of the river away from Port-Villez. In the interim, Monet’s circumstances had transformed. By the first years of the 20th century, he was famous and seeing financial success. Most straightforwardly, his mode of transportation has changed. The studio boat is out and a chauffeured car is in: a Panhard & Levassor, then the fastest thing on four wheels. The car not only allowed Monet to explore a much wider area, but escape the stifling heat of the 1901 summer and decamp to Lavacourt, where he rented a house overlooking the Seine.