Christie's To Offer $35 M. Renoir Painting Owned By Whitney Family

A long-held Impressionist portrait with a distinguished American provenance is about to reenter the market. Pierre-Auguste Renoir's *La femme aux lilas (Portrait de Nini Lopez)*, painted in 1876–77, will be offered at Christie's 20th Century Evening Sale on May 18 with an estimate of $25 million to $35 million.

The work has not appeared at auction in 97 years. It shows Nini Lopez, a young Parisian actress, rendered with Renoir's characteristic warmth: golden hair, pale skin, flushed cheeks, and a bouquet of white and pink flowers held close as she looks away from the viewer.

Its provenance is as notable as the painting itself. Joan Whitney Payson and Charles Payson acquired the canvas in 1929 for $100,000, and it remained in the family thereafter, passing to their daughter, Lorinda Payson de Roulet, who died last November at 95. Christie's will also sell nine works from de Roulet's collection in the same evening sale.

The Whitney Payson name carries unusual weight in American collecting history. Joan Whitney Payson built one of the country's most admired holdings of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, while her aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founded the Whitney Museum of American Art. The family's collecting legacy also intersects with Renoir's market history: another painting from the same period, *Au Moulin de la Galette* - later renamed *Bal du Moulin de la Galette* - set the artist's auction record in 1990, when it sold for $78.1 million at Sotheby's New York.

Christie's has described *La femme aux lilas* as the most important Renoir to come to market in decades. Even so, the estimate places it well below the artist's record, underscoring how rare it is for a work with this level of quality and provenance to surface at all.

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