Rounding off the night, a group of Impressionist pictures demonstrated the movement’s enduring appeal. Claude Monet’s verdant painting of a Parisian urban oasis Le Parc Monceau (1878) made £6,760,000; Edgar Degas’s pastel of a nude bather Femme sortant du bain (c. 1887-90), which has been owned by the same family for over a century, made £1,880,000; and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Rochers de l’Estate (1882), created during the weeks he spent painting the arid landscape in the south of France with Paul Cezanne, made £762,000.
Meanwhile, Study for ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’ (1885), by John Singer Sargent — a close friend of Degas, Monet and Renoir — made £3,466,000. The rare oil on canvas is a preparatory work the landmark painting in Tate Britain’s collection.
The Art of the Surreal
Later in the night, the 25th edition of The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale sold 100 per cent by lot, the 26 works totalling of £42,978,950 / $57,419,877 / €49,210,898, selling 151 per cent of the sale’s low estimate and 54 per cent of lots sold above their high estimate.
René Magritte achieved the top price of the auction with Les grâces naturelles (c. 1961), which has been exhibited at the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, and the Fondation Beyeler in Basel. It made £8,520,000.
Four more of his works were on offer in the sale. The surreal landscape La jeunesse illustrée (1937) made £2,307,000; the nude torso La grande marée (1946) made £1,392,000; a portrait in pearls Shéhérazade (c. 1947-48) made £952,500; and a gouache and collage L’esprit et la forme (1961) made £762,000.
One of the biggest draws on the evening was Dorothea Tanning’s Children’s Games (1942). Measuring 23 x 14 centimetres and until only months ago was on long-term loan to the Museum of Art in Dallas, it made £4,686,000 against a low estimate of just £1,000,000, smashing the artist’s auction record set at £2,463,863 in November 2025.