PARIS.- Sotheby’s Paris unveiled Le Temps Retrouvé: The Schlumberger Collection, one of the most valuable private collections of Impressionist and Modern art ever to come to auction in France. Comprising masterpieces hidden from public view for decades, and in many cases since their execution, the collection features works by Claude Monet, Gustave Moreau, Paul Cézanne, Gustave Courbet, Camille Claudel and many more. Estimated in excess of €40 million / $45 million, the collection brings together an exceptional group of works assembled over more than four decades by Jeanne Schlumberger (1889-1983), whose pioneering eye and prescient vision shaped one of the most remarkable collections of its kind.

Leading the sale is Claude Monet’s monumental Iris (1924-25), an extraordinary masterpiece from the artist's final years at Giverny. Estimated at €22–30 million, the painting is the most important work from this celebrated series ever to appear on the market and the largest example remaining in private hands. Among the most ambitious and innovative paintings of Monet’s late career, Iris has an equally extraordinary history, having been acquired by visionary gallerist Katia Granoff (1895-1989), with the prescient backing of Jeanne Schlumberger. Together, they understood that Monet’s late works were not the final chapters of Impressionism, but the opening pages of Modernism and Abstraction. Never before exhibited publicly, and known only from black and white photographs, Iris is unveiled today for the first time alongside other highlights from the collection, before travelling to Hong Kong and New York ahead of its auction in Paris on 22 October during Art Basel.

It is joined by a second work by Monet, Saule pleureur or L'Arbre de feu (est. €9-12 million), one of the most celebrated works from the artist’s series of paintings depicting weeping willows in his Giverny garden. Both paintings descended directly from Claude Monet to his son Michel Monet before passing into the hands of Katia Granoff – whose pioneering advocacy helped shape the collection – and ultimately entering the Schlumberger collection. Their appearance on the market coincides with the centenary year of Monet’s death, as museums both in France and worldwide pay homage to the artist.

Yet, Le Temps Retrouvé extends far beyond Monet, tracing a broader history of artistic innovation through exceptional works by Paul Cézanne, Pierre Bonnard, Gustave Moreau, Gustave Courbet, Camille Claudel, Eugène Delacroix and Chaïm Soutine. From Cézanne’s rare mural originating from the legendary Jas de Bouffan, the artist’s familial home and creative laboratory, to Bonnard’s luminous evocations of memory and nature, and Moreau’s sumptuous Symbolist vision, the collection traces a lineage of artistic innovation that shaped the course of twentieth-century painting, each work representing a pivotal moment in the emergence of modern art.
 
“Great collections are built on taste. The greatest, perhaps, are built on conviction. The story of the Schlumberger Collection is, ultimately, one of seeing what others could not. Jeanne Schlumberger and Katia Granoff recognised the radical brilliance of these works at a time when many still overlooked them. One collected, the other championed, both trusted their instincts when the world seemed to have already made up its mind. Today, as this Impressionist trove makes its market debut, it does so as the legacy of two women who changed the destiny of the artists they believed in. Just as Jeanne Schlumberger and Katia Granoff helped rewrite the history of Impressionism, Le Temps Retrouvé will mark a defining chapter for Sotheby’s Paris, for the art market, and for a new generation of collectors.” -- THOMAS BOMPARD, CO-HEAD OF MODERN & CONTEMPORARY ART, SOTHEBY'S FRANCE
 
TWO WOMEN AHEAD OF THEIR TIME: JEANNE SCHLUMBERGER AND KATIA GRANOFF

At the heart of the collection lies the story of two visionary women whose conviction helped shape the legacy of some of the greatest artists of the modern era: Jeanne Schlumberger and Katia Granoff.

The collection once adorned the walls of the Schlumberger family's hôtel particulier on rue Las-Cases in Paris, home to Jeanne and Marcel Schlumberger. While the Schlumberger name became synonymous with one of the twentieth-century’s great industrial dynasties, it was Jeanne who was the true architect of its artistic legacy.

Beginning in the 1950s, and carrying on for over four decades, Jeanne worked hand in glove with Katia Granoff, building a collection of exceptional breadth and quality. Their relationship, borne out of a shared connection and mutual trust, would prove transformative for both. More than a collector and a dealer, they became partners in a shared vision. Jeanne offered support, confidence and patronage; Katia offered access, expertise and a rare instinct for discovering greatness before the rest of the world recognised it. Artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Chaïm Soutine, Georges Rouault, Othon Friesz and Pierre Laprade all found in the Parisian dealer an unwavering advocate.

In 1958, Jeanne appears to have played a discreet but important role in financing Granoff's acquisition of Michel Monet's studio holdings, enabling Granoff to secure one of the most extraordinary groups of Monet masterpieces ever to come onto the market. The acquisition was daring, ambitious and, in many respects, visionary. At the time when these late works attracted little interest in France, Granoff recognised their radical modernity, helping place major paintings in leading American museums – such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago – and private collections, ultimately reshaping appreciation of Monet’s final years. Both women understood that these late works were not the closing chapter of Impressionism, but a bridge to Modernism, anticipating many of the artistic innovations that would come to define the second half of the twentieth century, from Mark Rothko to Joan Mitchell.

Jeanne Schlumberger was among the very first private collectors to share that conviction. Through her close friendship with Granoff, she acquired exceptional works from this remarkable group long before they achieved their canonical status, and treasured them for decades to come. Before the Musée Marmottan Monet became the sole repository of the artist’s estate in 1966, only three collections in Paris were devoted to the preservation and promotion of Monet’s visionary late works: the Musée de l’Orangerie, the Galerie Katia Granoff and the Schlumberger Collection.

Whether acting as patron, partner or trusted confidante, Jeanne Schlumberger’s support helped make possible one of the most consequential rediscoveries in the history of Impressionism while ensuring that some of its finest works found a home within the Schlumberger collection.
 
INSIDE THE COLLECTION

CLAUDE MONET
Iris
1924-25
Estimate: €22,000,0000-30,000,000

The undisputed masterpiece of the collection, Claude Monet’s Iris ranks among the most important late works by the artist - and the largest example from this celebrated series - remaining in private hands. Painted in 1924-25, during the final years of Monet’s life at Giverny, it belongs to an exceptionally rare group of twenty paintings from the series executed between 1914 and 1925, and represents one of the most ambitious achievements of his career. Measuring an extraordinary 160 by 180 centimetres, Iris is the only work of this scale from Monet’s final decade to remain outside a museum collection. Its only true counterpart is today housed at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris.

Never exhibited publicly before and known only from a black and white photograph, the work comes to auction with an estimate of €22-30 million - the highest estimate ever assigned to a painting at auction in France.

By the mid-1920s, Monet had moved far beyond the concerns of Impressionism. At Giverny, he transformed his celebrated garden into what Marcel Proust described as a “garden of hues and colours”. It was here that he pursued what he described as “the illusion of an endless whole” – a pictorial world no longer bound by conventional perspective or fixed horizons, but one capable of enveloping the viewer in a continuous field of light, colour and sensation.

Originating in Japan, irises were one of Monet’s favourite flowers and a familiar motif from the Japanese prints he owned by artists such as Hokusai. Important paintings from this series, which also passed through the hands of Katia Granoff, are now housed in leading museum collections around the world, including The National Gallery in London and the Art Institute of Chicago.
 
“Remarkably well preserved, unlined and unvarnished, Iris and Saule pleureur offer an exceptional insight into Monet's ultimate artistic project.” -- Marianne Mathieu, Historian of Impressionism, Director of the Nymphéas project (WPI) and former Scientific Director of the Musée Marmottan-Monet
 
CLAUDE MONET
Saule pleureur or L'Arbre de feu
1918-19
Estimate: €9,000,000-12,000,000

Painted in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Saule pleureur hails from Claude Monet’s late career. Executed between 1918 and 1919, it belongs to the celebrated series of just ten paintings depicting the majestic weeping willow that stood beside the artist’s lily pond at Giverny. Today, works from this groundbreaking group reside in some of the world’s most important museum collections, including the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris and the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas.

The composition is strikingly modern: the weeping willow fills the surface, the sky disappears, and the viewer is confronted with a dense, immersive curtain of colour and brushwork. Bathed in vibrant greens, blazing reds, purples and golds, the tree pulses with life and movement and becomes almost sculptural, the surface rich, layered and luminous. Katia Granoff would later describe these paintings as Monet’s arbres de feu, “trees of fire,” a fitting expression for works that seem charged with an almost elemental energy. In creating this work, Monet applied colour directly onto the canvas from paint tubes, achieving a gestural force and chromatic audacity which would resonate profoundly with the Abstract Expressionists.

Saule pleureur, together with two further works by Monet - La Maison à Travers les Roses (circa 1925-26, est. €2-3 million) and La Seine à Vernon, Arbres (1894, est. €1.2-1.8 million) - share the same exceptional provenance: all have remained out of public view since their creation and each passed directly from Claude Monet to his son, Michel, and thence into the Schlumberger Collection via Katia Granoff, where they were treasured for more than half a century.
 
PAUL CÉZANNE
La Ferme
1862-64
Estimate: €600,000-800,000

It was at Jas de Bouffan, Cézanne’s beloved family home in Provence, that the young artist learned to observe, experiment, invent, and ultimately challenge pictorial conventions. Between 1862 and 1864 he painted the ground floor walls with a large mural - Paysage romantique aux pêcheurs - depicting bucolic scenes inspired by the great masters of the past. Following the dispersal of the estate in 1899, the mural was detached, transferred to canvas, and ultimately divided into eight fragments, preserving rare remnants of one of Cézanne's earliest and most ambitious artistic projects.

Three of these compositions - acquired by Jeanne Schlumberger through Katia Granoff - will be offered in this sale: La Ferme (est. €600,000-800,000), Arbres au Bord de la Rivière (est. €400,000-600,000), and Ciel Entre les Arbres (est. €400,000-600,000). Measuring approximately 149 x 180 cm, La Ferme is the largest work by the artist ever offered at auction.

Now designated Trésors nationaux, the paintings are recognised as works of major importance to France's cultural heritage.
 
GUSTAVE MOREAU
Rêve d’Orient
1881
Estimate: €600,000-800,000

Acquired by Jeanne Schlumberger in 1971, Gustave Moreau’s Rêve d’Orient is one of the greatest works by the artist ever to come to auction. Hailing from Moreau’s most celebrated and inventive period, it displays all the characteristics that define his finest compositions - luminous colour, exquisite ornament and a poetic vision uniquely his own.

Rêve d’Orient draws inspiration from the myths, literature and visual culture of the Middle East, Persia and India. The artist creates an invented universe governed by beauty, reverie and desire, in which every passage of translucent watercolor is enriched with delicate touches of gouache, producing a surface of astonishing richness that rivals the brilliance of enamel, miniature painting or precious gemstones. The watercolor also reveals Moreau’s mastery of a medium he elevated to unprecedented heights.

By the early 1880s, Moreau had become one of the most enigmatic and admired figures in European art. Celebrated by a devoted circle of collectors and writers, yet regarded by many contemporaries as a visionary apart from any established school, he occupied a singular place within the cultural imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris.

CAMILLE CLAUDEL
La Valse, petit modèle
Conceived in 1895 and cast in 1905 by Eugène Blot, casting n. 1/4
Estimate: €400,000-600,000

La Valse (“The Waltz”) is undoubtedly Camille Claudel’s most famous work and one of her most erotic sculptures. Conceived in the closing years of the nineteenth century, it coincides with a period of intense artistic production and her passionate relationship with Auguste Rodin.

During this period, Claudel made several versions of the subject. In her first version, she presented her dancers nude; the Administration des Beaux-Arts was so shocked by her audacious composition, they demanded she dress her figures, which Claudel partially accomplished with the sweeping fabric that appears to flow out of the female figure's back.

The Eugène Blot casting holds a particularly important place in Claudel’s oeuvre. Claudel met Blot through the art critic and friend of Rodin, Gustave Geoffroy, and it was Blot who, from 1905 onward, became one of the few dealers willing to champion her work at a moment when she had broken definitively with Rodin's circle and struggled for recognition in her own right.

With The Waltz, Claudel gained the recognition of many of her contemporaries; as Léon Daudet wrote: “Only a great and broad mind could have conceived this materialisation of the invisible.”
 
PIERRE BONNARD
La Cueillette des Prunes
Circa 1899
Estimate: €600,000-800,000

La Cueillette des Prunes once likely formed the central panel of a monumental decorative triptych executed by Pierre Bonnard around 1899. The two companion panels, La Cueillette des pommes and Enfants jouant avec une chèvre, are now held in the collection of the Pola Museum of Art, Kanagawa. Ambitious in both scale and conception, the ensemble ranks among the most accomplished decorative projects of Bonnard’s early career, revealing with remarkable poetic resonance the lush vegetal world that would remain a constant source of inspiration throughout his oeuvre.

Like many of the works in the collection, La Cueillette des Prunes has remained largely hidden from public view, having last been exhibited in 1956, more than seventy years ago.

As an early and significant expression of the garden theme to which Bonnard would return throughout his career, the work encapsulates his Arcadian vision, balancing rich colour, decorative harmony and a dreamlike atmosphere to create a lyrical meditation on the relationship between humanity and nature.