For the first time in 97 years, Pierre-Auguste Renoir‘s La femme aux lilas (Portrait de Nini Lopez) will hit the auction block, with an estimate of $25 million to $35 million.
Set for Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale on May 18, the 1876–77 painting depicts Nini Lopez, a young Parisian actress, as a golden-haired woman with milky-pale skin and ruddy cheeks gazing into the distance, as she clasps a bouquet of white and pink flowers.
The painting has a unique provenance: since 1929, it has been owned by the Whitney Payson family, a historic American family that Max Carter, Christie’s global chairman of 20th- and 21st-century art, described to the New York Post as “one of the greatest, if not the greatest, American collecting family over the 20th century.”
