A big night for Toulouse-Lautrec & Christie’s
Christopher Michaud

NEW YORK—It was a big night for Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Christie’s, when the auction house sold the artist’s painting of a laundress for a record-smashing $22,416,000 on Tuesday. “The Laundress,” the most expensive painting of the annual autumn art auctions at Christie’s and rival Sotheby’s, also achieved the highest price at the first of two weeks of critical sales, coming in right in the middle of its $20 million to $25 million pre-sale estimate.
The moving portrait of a local woman gazing out a window from 1886-87 easily eclipsed the old record for Toulouse-Lautrec of $14,522,500, set in 1997, and was a critical factor in the success of Christies’ Impressionist and modern sale, which took in $160,931,200 including commission.
Christie’s was staging the biggest sale in years and by its own admission it aggressively pursued an important private collection. But it suffered a few hefty casualties when Henri Matisse’s “Marguerites,” which at $10 million to $15 million carried the highest estimate after the Toulouse-Lautrec, failed to sell as bidding topped off at $8.8 million.
A pair of Monets from the same collection of 13 works also went down, drawing no bids beyond $3.2 million after pre-sale estimates of $4 million to $6 million. Christie’s honorary chairman and the sale’s auctioneer, Christopher Burge, said the total for the auction was the biggest since 1990, when a speculation-driven boom market characterized by a frenzy of buying, mostly by Japanese buyers, drove prices to then-stratospheric levels.
The sale’s total fell just about in the middle of the pre-sale estimates, with a healthy 58 of the 63 lots on offer finding buyers. Other highlights included Monet’s “Water Lilies,” one of the artist’s seminal works painted in 1907 which fetched $14,016,000, just under its high estimate of $15 million.
But in some respects the star of the night was Paul Cezanne’s still life, “Apples and cakes,” which soared to $10,320,000, or more than twice its high estimate of $4.5 million, making it the sale’s third-most-expensive work. The auctions continue on Wednesday when Sotheby’s holds its Impressionist and modern art sale, with contemporary and post-war sales at both houses slated for next week.