[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/PIERRE-AUGUSTE_RENOIR_La_femme_aux_lilas_Portrait_de_Nini_Lopez.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tFor the first time in 97 years, Pierre-Auguste Renoir\u2018s La femme aux lilas (Portrait de Nini Lopez)<\/em> will hit the auction block, with an estimate of $25 million to $35 million.<\/p>\n \n\tSet for Christie\u2019s 20th Century Evening Sale on May 18, the 1876\u201377 painting depicts Nini Lopez, a young Parisian actress, as a golden-haired woman with milky-pale skin and ruddy cheeks gazing into the distance, as she clasps a bouquet of white and pink flowers.<\/p>\n \n\tThe painting has a unique provenance: since 1929, it has been owned by the Whitney Payson family, a historic American family that Max Carter, Christie\u2019s global chairman of 20th- and 21st-century art, described to the New York Post<\/em> as \u201cone of the greatest, if not the greatest, American collecting family over the 20th century.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe painting was purchased for $100,000 in 1929 by Joan Whitney Payson and her husband, Charles Payson. The work was one of the first pieces Whitney Payson bought, as she went on to build one of the most storied collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, as well as founding the New York Mets baseball club. Her collection is now on permanent loan to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.<\/p>\n \n\tThe painting has stayed in the family ever since, passing to her daughter Lorinda Payson de Roulet, who died last November at the age of 95, reported the New York Times<\/em>. During the 20th Century Evening Sale, Christie\u2019s will be auctioning off nine pieces from de Roulet\u2019s art collection, the Post<\/em> reported.<\/p>\n \n\tWhitney Payson and de Roulet were far from the only art collectors in the family. Whitney Payson\u2019s aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, wife of businessman Harry Payne Whitney, daughter of quintessential Gilded Age railroad titan Cornelius Vanderbilt II, was the namesake and founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art.<\/p>\n \n\tNotably, another Renoir from the same time period and also purchased in 1929 by a member of the family, John Hay Whitney, set the artist\u2019s auction record in 1990. The painting, Au Moulin de la Galette<\/em> (1876), since renamed Bal du Moulin de la Galette<\/em>, sold for $78.1 million at Sotheby\u2019s New York in 1990 to Japanese businessman Ryoei Saito. That record has yet to be broken.<\/p>\n \n\tWhile Christie\u2019s curators have described the painting as \u201cthe most important Renoir to come to market in decades,\u201d it is unlikely La femme aux lilas<\/em> will come close to Renoir\u2019s auction record, with an estimate topping out at $35 million.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/market\/pierre-auguste-renoir-painting-joan-whitney-payson-mets-1234782032\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/PIERRE-AUGUSTE_RENOIR_La_femme_aux_lilas_Portrait_de_Nini_Lopez.jpg?w=1024″] For the first time in 97 years, Pierre-Auguste Renoir\u2018s La femme aux lilas (Portrait de Nini Lopez) will hit the auction block, with an estimate of $25 million to $35 million. Set for Christie\u2019s 20th Century Evening Sale on May 18, the 1876\u201377 painting depicts Nini Lopez, a young Parisian actress, as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1893162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1893162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1893162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1893162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1893162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1893162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1893162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}