Monet Painting Sells for $56.2 M., Setting French Auction Record at Sotheby’s Paris

The Roman sculpture smashed its presale estimate of $12 million. The post $34.3M Roman Marble Busts Through Antiquity Record at Sotheby’s appeared first on Artnet News .

Three works by Paul Cézanne have been removed from the “Le Temps Retrouvé: The Schlumberger Collection” evening sale at Sotheby’s Paris on Thursday coinciding with Art Basel Paris. The three works: La Ferme, Arbres au Bord de la Rivière and Ciel Entre les Arbres, carried a combined estimate of $1.57 million to $2.24 million (€1.4 million to €2 million) and were painted between 1862 and 1864. The paintings are being returned to the artist’s hometown in Aix-en-Provenance to be displayed at the Musée Granet along with the artist’s other work. Sotheby’s said it has been holding discussions with the Schlumberger family and the town of Aix-en-Provence which, with the support of the French Ministry of Culture, now intends to acquire the artworks for the museum.

An ancient fragment of a statue of a Roman emperor sold last night at Sotheby’s for $34.3 million, a sum that the house has deemed an auction record for a Roman antiquity. The three-and-a-half-foot-tall marble fragment depicts only the emperor’s torso, adorned in an elegant bronze cuirass. According to Sotheby’s, it once belonged to a larger statue of an emperor from the Julio-Claudinian dynasty and dates to the 1st century CE. Like many Roman statues, it is a copy of a Greek one.