Claude Monet's 'Iris' (1924–25) sold for €50 million ($56.2 million) including buyer's premium at Sotheby's Paris on the evening of 22 October, setting a new auction record in France. The monumental late-Giverny canvas drew a 45-minute bidding contest before falling to a private collector in Asia. The hammer result more than doubled the painting's €22–30 million low estimate — itself the highest valuation ever assigned to a painting offered at auction in France — and eclipsed the previous national record of €43.2 million ($48.4 million) set by Amedeo Modigliani's 'Tête de Caryatide' at Christie's Paris in 2010.

The record price carries an extraordinary backstory. 'Iris' had never been publicly exhibited and never left the Schlumberger family's Paris mansion since Jeanne Schlumberger acquired it; it was known only through a black-and-white photograph. It is the largest iris composition Monet produced in the 1920s and the only one still in private hands. Schlumberger bought it through Parisian dealer Katia Granoff, who in 1956 acquired a trove of Monet's late studio holdings from the artist's son Michel, staking her own fortune on canvases critics then dismissed as the faltering work of a near-blind old master. 'Iris' survives unlined and unvarnished, a condition Granoff and Schlumberger's heirs preserved for seventy years.

The evening's other Schlumberger lots performed strongly: 'Saule Pleureur' (1918–19) made €9.6 million within its €9–12 million estimate, 'La Maison à Travers les Roses' (1925–26) sold for €2.5 million, and 'La Seine à Vernon, Arbres' (1894) more than doubled its high estimate at €4.2 million. A version of Camille Claudel's 'La Valse' (1895) fetched €832,000 against a €400,000–600,000 estimate. Absent from the rostrum were three early Cézannes, designated national treasures and withdrawn hours before the sale after Aix-en-Provence, backed by the French Ministry of Culture, moved to acquire them for the Musée Granet in the artist's hometown.

The sale lands in the centenary year of Monet's death on 5 December 1926. Sotheby's attached no guarantee to any lot, making the €50 million an unforced market verdict on the most surprising re-emergence of Paris auction week.