After 40 years, Monet's impressionist paintings emerge from Jeanne Schlumberger's collection to Sotheby's Paris for auction. There are paintings that enter an auction room, and there are paintings that make history, changing the temperature of the room. With the highest estimation attributed to an auction painting in France, the Iris painting is revealed to the public for the first time.
Claude Monet’s Iris Comes to Sotheby’s Paris
This October, Sotheby’s Paris will unveil Claude Monet’s Iris, painted in 1924–25 and estimated at €22–30 million, as the extraordinary centerpiece of Le Temps Retrouvé: La Collection Schlumberger. It is the kind of work around which an entire sale seems to orbit: monumental, enthralling, intensely atmospheric, and still carrying the strange sensation of a garden remembered rather than simply painted. It's a botanical painting, and yet why is it worth so much?
Why Is Monet’s Iris Worth €22–30 Million?
For more than forty years, Jeanne Schlumberger, first collector who recognized and defended Monet's revolutionary modern late work, assembled the collection with an eye toward artists whose work pushed against the conventions of their own time. Monet’s late practice was central to that vision. Iris belongs to the final decade of the artist’s career, when his gardens at Giverny were no longer merely subjects but increasingly became immersive fields of colour, movement and abstraction.
The Garden, Memory and Abstraction in Monet’s Iris
Here, the familiar language of the water-lily garden gives way to something more elusive. Tall iris rise through dense vegetation while the surface of the painting seems to dissolve into an almost dreamlike collision of blue, green, gold and grey.
The flowers are present, but so is the atmosphere around them—the painting hovering somewhere between garden, memory and pure sensation. Billowing clouds on the edge of the painting merge with the clear blue sky, a symbol of fusion or confusion?
The distinction feels deliberately difficult to make. Where does the garden end and the sky begin? Where does the physical landscape give way to the landscape of memory? Monet seems less interested in defining each element than in allowing them to bleed into one another, creating a vision in which earth, sky, flower and light become almost inseparable.
To the onlooker, each element in the Iris, 160 x 180 cm tableau, connotes more meaning than meets the eye.
Monet’s Late Paintings at Giverny
It is also a remarkably rare opportunity to see the work outside the privacy of the Schlumberger collection. Sotheby’s describes the 28 works assembled for the sale as rarely shown publicly, with many being presented for the first time.
Iris is not alone in representing Monet’s late fascination with the gardens of Giverny.
Alongside it is Saule pleureur ou L’Arbre de feu, estimated at €9–12 million, another major work from the artist’s celebrated series of weeping willows. Painted around 1918–19, the work brings another dimension to Monet’s increasingly atmospheric vision of the garden, where trees, light and colour begin to dissolve into one another.
Together, the two paintings offer a glimpse into the intense evolution of Monet’s late practice. The garden was no longer simply a landscape to be observed, but a space through which he could explore perception itself—light, movement, colour and the instability of what the eye believes it sees.
In Iris, flowers become almost atmospheric; in Saule pleureur ou L’Arbre de feu, the willow becomes something closer to a veil of colour, texture, and movement. Both works reveal an artist moving ever further from the descriptive landscape and toward an increasingly immersive language of painting.
Inside Jeanne Schlumberger’s Collection
And Iris is quite literally the largest statement in the room.
The subject of a garden cultivated with care to the point of being a real laboratory of perception, that envelops spectators in an aerial perspective of light, colors, sensations that is both poignant and resplendent with the feeling being in nature gives.
A grounded kind of wonder that gives pause to breakneck speed of modern life.
The Schlumberger Collection and Monet’s Revolutionary Late Work
At an estimated €22–30 million, it carries the highest estimate ever attributed to a painting presented at auction in France.
That figure places the work in a different category from the usual seasonal auction spectacle: this is a late Monet of substantial scale, provenance and art-historical importance, emerging from a collection that spent decades quietly building its own argument about modernity.
When Will Claude Monet’s Iris Be Auctioned?
The timing feels particularly salient. The sale, taking place on October 22 at Sotheby’s Paris, follows an advance exhibition from September 17–18 and again from October 16–22, giving audiences the rare chance to encounter Iris at close range before it enters the auction room.
Sotheby’s Paris Exhibition and October 22 Auction
For a painting made at the end of Monet’s life, there is something almost wonderfully untidy about its refusal to behave like an ending. Iris is not a quiet farewell to Impressionism. It is a painting pushing forward—toward abstraction, toward atmosphere, toward the kind of visual freedom that would become increasingly consequential for generations of artists after him.
The Schlumberger collection, meanwhile, suggests that Jeanne Schlumberger understood precisely what she was looking at. A collection of impressionist artworks that are as deeply moving as they are bewildering, profoundly confounding the boundaries between botany, art, and heritage.
And now, after more than four decades in her collection, Iris is ready to be seen again.
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Written by Editor-in-Chief, Jennifer Youngmann for Sotheby's Paris Art Auction & Sales at an exclusive press viewing on Thursday, September 15th. Avenue Magazine For Le Temps Retrouve: La Collection Schlumberger.