Monet’s ‘Iris’ Sells for €50 Million at Sotheby’s Paris Auction

On October 22, 2026, Claude Monet’s monumental painting ‘Iris’ was sold at Sotheby’s Paris for €50 million including buyer’s fees, which is approximately $56 million. This sale made ‘Iris’ the most expensive work by Monet ever sold in France. The painting is the largest from Monet’s celebrated Iris series and was previously part of the collection of Jeanne Schlumberger, an heir to the Schlumberger oil company.

The winning bid for ‘Iris’ was placed by a client on the phone, with Jen Hua, the deputy chairman of Sotheby’s Asia, acting as the intermediary. The painting was one of twenty-seven works from Schlumberger’s collection offered at the auction. Among these were three additional paintings by Monet.

Three-quarters of the works from the Schlumberger collection sold for prices above their high pre-sale estimates. The auction as a whole achieved total sales of €74.4 million ($83.7 million) including fees. This figure was well above the pre-sale estimate of €40 million, which was calculated without fees.

Among the Monet works offered at Sotheby’s was ‘Saule Pleureur’ (Weeping Willow), which had been valued between €9 million and €12 million. The auction also included other significant works from the Schlumberger collection, though specific details about these were not provided in the available sources.

Shortly before the Sotheby’s auction began, three paintings by Paul Cézanne, which had been classified as French national treasures, were withdrawn from the sale. According to Sotheby’s, these works were removed with the intention of returning them to Cézanne’s hometown of Aix-en-Provence.

On the same day, a separate auction was held by Christie’s in Paris. At this event, 26 works were sold, including two Monet paintings: ‘Bord des falaises à Pourville’, which sold for €12.7 million, and ‘Trois pots de tulipes’, which fetched €3.1 million. Other notable sales at Christie’s included Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s ‘Jeunes filles au bord de la mer’ for €5.8 million and Pablo Picasso’s ‘Nature morte au gruyere’ for €3 million.

The total realized at Christie’s Paris auction was €41.6 million, including buyer fees. These auctions in Paris featured major works by leading Impressionist and modern artists, with several lots achieving prices above their estimates and attracting significant attention from collectors.