Although Claude Monet was rather more hard-nosed in business matters than some art historians give him credit for, he would have been astonished to find that a painting he completed at his home in Giverny, near Paris, in 1919 when his eyesight was failing, would be sold last month at Christies in London for £40,921,250.

The buyer, said to be American, liquidised some of his Wall Street shareholdings to buy the picture, believing art more likely to keep its value. For tax reasons the picture may remain in England. It could even be put on display in the National Gallery, because of the problems of insuring it even in the best protected private house. New telephone bidders, both Russian, came in at £26M and £27M and in all eleven bidders took part but no one else was prepared to match this extraordinary record bid.

The work, Le Bassin aux Nymphéas, was part of Monet’s last painting campaign and is regarded as of exceptional importance. Unlike most Impressionist paintings of this period, it was highly finished, signed, dated and sold personally by the artist shortly after execution.

Monet had created his famous garden at Giverny after a long battle with the local authorities, who objected to his scheme to reroute and dam the river Epte to create a large pond. So what led Monet to part with this and three sister paintings of his beloved water lilies, which he regarded very much as work in progress, and otherwise kept hidden in his studio? It was almost certainly the long cordial relationship he had enjoyed with Alexander Bernheim, who in 1874 began to exhibit Impressionist paintings at his gallery in Paris before they received any public recognition or acclaim.

Bernheim died in 1915 but his two sons, Josse and Gaston, had already made their name in the art world as the centre of the avant-garde, organizing the first Van Gogh exhibition in 1901 at the gallery, which had been renamed Bernheim-Jeune. But they wanted to become known as the bastion of Impressionist art and persuaded Monet to sell them four of his water lilies works in November 1919. In January and February 1921, the pictures had pride of place in an exhibition at the gallery. Within a year, however, Le Bassin aux Nymphéas had been sold to a rival gallery, Durand-Ruel. According to one version of events, Gaston Bernheim had an affair with its owner, Madame d’Alayer, Marie-Louise Durand-Ruel. It is not clear whether Marie-Louise always wanted the picture more than Gaston but she stayed with her husband Jean d’Alayer, who signed the cheque. 

 The Bernheim-Jeune gallery remains one of the most famous in France and is into its fifth generation of Bernheims. They trace its origins even further back than Alexandre, who started his first gallery in Paris in 1863 on the advice of another formidable painter, Gustave Courbet. The original Bernheim was Joseph, who made artists’ materials in Besançon around 1795, when his impecunious clients gave him pictures to pay their bills.

From our July 2008 e-newsletter