NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby's will present a selection of works from Armand Hammer’s storied private collection, with proceeds to benefit the Armand Hammer Foundation. The series of sales, beginning with the Modern Evening Auction in New York this November, offers collectors and institutions a rare opportunity to acquire paintings that once formed part of one of the twentieth century's most celebrated private collections. The selection of 12 works is estimated in the region of $25–37 million. Proceeds from the sales will benefit the Foundation's mission, building upon the tradition of public good that Dr. Armand Hammer established during his lifetime.

“Armand Hammer's imprint on Los Angeles is difficult to overstate. He believed that collecting art came with an obligation to share it, a conviction that shaped not only his own museum but decades of gifts to institutions across this city and beyond. Long before Los Angeles was recognized as a global capital for art, Hammer was already insisting that world-class painting belonged here, and that legacy of generosity is very much still alive in the Foundation's work today. It feels fitting that these paintings will be celebrated here in Los Angeles before they travel on to the wider world.” -- Jacqueline Wachter, Vice Chairman, Private Sales, Contemporary, Head of Los Angeles Office
 
The group of works is led by Edgar Degas' Trois danseuses (Jupes jaunes) and Mary Cassatt's Summertime, a jewel-toned view of leisure on the water, poised to set a new auction record for the artist. Together with works by Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and more, the November sales will showcase the breadth and quality of Dr. Hammer's collecting vision and his enduring appreciation for many of the defining figures of nineteenth and early twentieth-century art.

In December, the collection's celebrated marine masterpiece by Ivan Aivazovsky, The Naval Blockade of Crete, will be presented in Sotheby's Old Master & 19th Century Paintings Evening Auction in London. Widely regarded as one of the foremost marine painters of the nineteenth century, Aivazovsky achieved extraordinary effects of light, atmosphere, and movement, and The Naval Blockade of Crete is among the most ambitious and accomplished compositions.

Following the Los Angeles preview, traveling exhibitions of New York Sales highlights will be held in Hong Kong (October 13–15) and Paris (October 19-23), ahead of the November sales in New York. The collection's presentation will continue through Sotheby's Fabergé, Imperial & Revolutionary Art sale in London this November, its Old Master & 19th Century Paintings Evening Auction in London this December, and into 2027, with additional works to be offered in Sotheby's Art of the Americas sale in January and its Master Paintings & Works of Art sales in February, all held in New York.

More than an assembly of exceptional works, this grouping stands as a deeply personal reflection of Dr. Hammer's life of adventure and connoisseurship. Each painting, and particularly the masterpieces by Degas, Cassatt, Pissarro, Renoir, and Aivazovsky speaks to his highly discerning eye and his lifelong intellectual and artistic curiosity. As Hammer himself once wrote, "Collecting art is a challenge, one I have pursued throughout my life, traveling the world over and learning that art has a universal way of speaking to each of us." -- Dr. Armand Hammer





“My great-grandfather was a lifetime student of the arts and a patron who believed that arts institutions play an essential role in uplifting the lives of individuals, communities, and nations. To build upon his incredible legacy as an advocate for the arts, the Foundation will be transitioning from stewardship of the collection to investing our resources in arts education and institutions.” -- Viktor Hammer, Chairman, Armand Hammer Foundation

Dr. Armand Hammer (1898–1990) was among the most consequential collectors of the twentieth century, a man whose life in business, diplomacy, and philanthropy was inextricable from his lifelong passion for art. Born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1898, Hammer trained as a physician at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, graduating in 1921 having already made his first fortune reviving his family's pharmaceutical business as a student. He never practiced medicine. That same year, he traveled to the newly formed Soviet Union to aid famine relief efforts in the Ural Mountains. The trip would also launch a career in international trade and forge a personal connection with Vladimir Lenin, an association that would open doors across six decades of Soviet-American relations.

Hammer's decade in Moscow, during which he oversaw a series of industrial and mining concessions, was also where his passion for collecting began, and he acquired historic Russian and European works that he brought back to the United States in 1930. In New York, he and his brother Victor founded Hammer Galleries, establishing Armand Hammer as a dealer as much as a collector and honing the discerning eye that would guide him as he assembled one of the century's great private collections.

In 1956, that same eye for undervalued opportunity led Hammer to an investment in a small California oil concern named Occidental Petroleum, which he transformed over the next three decades into one of the world's leading energy and chemical enterprises. The resources this success generated allowed him to pursue his collection with new ambition, and it grew during these years to span five centuries, from Old Masters by Rembrandt, Rubens, and Tiepolo to the Impressionist and American masters he prized above all others. Together, these works reflected, in his words, "the taste of a true connoisseur and a lifelong commitment to pursuing the finest works across periods, schools and traditions."

For Hammer, building his collection was never a private pursuit. He held that "great artists speak the same language to all men and women, and their works belong to all people," and he sent his paintings across the globe throughout his lifetime, including a landmark 1973 exhibition, the first by a private American collector, at the Hermitage and Pushkin Museums in the Soviet Union, and the monumental 500 Years of Masterpieces: Armand Hammer Collection exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in 1982. In recognition of this legacy, he received the National Medal of Arts in 1987.

Collection Highlights

Mary Cassatt
Summertime
1894–95
Estimate: $7 – 10 million

Among the collection's most significant works is Mary Cassatt's Summertime, painted in 1894–95 and long considered one of the artist's finest achievements in landscape, a genre she rarely explored. Cassatt was the only American and one of only a few women to exhibit with the Impressionists in Paris, and Summertime captures her at the height of her powers, rendering a woman and young girl adrift in a duck-filled pond in short, vigorous brushwork and opulent color.

The painting was completed shortly after Cassatt purchased the Château de Beaufresne, her summer home in the French countryside, where a windowed studio gave her a daily view of the pond that would become the likely setting for the work. Cassatt described the pleasure she took in the scene in a letter to her nephew's wife: "I am now painting with my models in the boat and I sit on the edge of the water and in these warm still September days it is lovely. The whole beauty of the place is in the water."

Summertime also reflects Cassatt's deep engagement with Japanese printmaking, an interest she shared with her friend and fellow Impressionist Edgar Degas. Its high horizon line, asymmetrical composition, and theme of female leisure recall the Ukiyo-e prints she encountered at an 1890 exhibition in Paris, which she described to Berthe Morisot as more beautiful than anything she could have dreamed.

Few paintings by Cassatt can rival Summertime in scale, ambition, or historical weight. It is the most significant work by the artist to appear at auction in thirty years, and arguably the finest example of her work ever to come to market. That distinction, together with the rarity of a mature landscape within her broader body of work, places Summertime not only among the artist’s masterpieces but among the great American Impressionist paintings still in private hands.

Before entering the collection of Dr. Armand Hammer, Summertime belonged to Huntington Hartford, the prominent collector and patron who founded the former Gallery of Modern Art in New York. Armand Hammer purchased the work at Parke-Bernet Galleries in 1971, where it made a record for both Cassatt and any female artist at the time. It has resided in the care of Hammer and his Foundation for the last fifty-five years. Summertime has been exhibited widely at institutions including the National Gallery of Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a public life that reflects Hammer's own conviction that a great private collection must also be a shared one.

Edgar Degas
Trois danseuses (Jupes jaunes)
Circa 1899
Estimate: $10 – 15 million

Alongside Summertime, another exceptional masterwork is Edgar Degas' Trois danseuses (Jupes jaunes), one of the finest examples of the artist's radical late period to ever come to market. Executed in the late 1890s, in the years after the Impressionist group had dissolved and Degas had withdrawn into an increasingly private, experimental studio practice, the painting depicts three dancers gathered informally in the wings, a subject Degas returned to throughout his career but transformed here into something closer to pure sensation than narrative. Loose, luminous brushwork dissolves the dancers' forms into the surrounding color. Degas rendered their yellow tutus with a boldness and physicality, applying paint in places directly with his fingers, marking some of the most daring painting of his career.

That daring was possible in part because Degas, unlike many of his Impressionist peers, never depended on sales to sustain himself, and by the 1890s he had grown famously reluctant to exhibit at all. As a result, the great majority of his late work remained in his studio at the time of his death in 1917, entering the market only through the estate sales that followed, of which the present painting was part of the very first, in May 1918. That history helps explain why so few works from this period have ever reached the market: of the small number of paintings from the 1890s depicting dancers resting or waiting in the wings, similar in spirit to the present work, only around six are known, and three of those already belong to museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.. Trois danseuses (Jupes jaunes) is widely considered the finest example still in private hands.

The painting's importance has long been recognized by scholars. It was chosen for the cover of the catalogue accompanying Degas and the Dance, the major 2002–03 exhibition organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and it has been included in exhibitions and publications on the artist for more than half a century. Degas' dancers remain the most sought-after subject in his market, and works of this scale and ambition from his mature period surface only rarely at auction.

Acquired by Armand Hammer at Sotheby's London in 1969, Trois danseuses (Jupes jaunes) has remained in the care of Hammer and his Foundation for more than fifty-five years, a tenure that speaks both to the exceptional quality of the painting and to Hammer's own eye for Degas' most significant late works.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Antibes
1888
Estimate: $2.5 – 3.5 million

Renoir's Antibes captures the sun-drenched Mediterranean port that would go on to draw artists for generations, a subject Monet painted around the same time and one that would later captivate Picasso. The work belongs to a pivotal moment in Renoir's career, following a period of travel through Algeria and Italy that pushed him to evolve from the looser, atmospheric style of his earlier Impressionist years. Reaching, for a time, toward the sculptural clarity of the Old Masters he had studied abroad, Renoir arrived by the late 1880s at a personal synthesis of the two, retaining the structure and volume of his classical studies while recovering the luminous color and fluid brushwork that had defined his best work. Antibes stands among the finest results of that resolution, uniting light, color, and form with a confidence that marks the full maturity of Renoir's style.

Camille Pissarro
Paysage à Osny, vue de la ferme
Circa 1883
Estimate: $2 – 3 million

Camille Pissarro's Paysage à Osny, vue de la ferme is among the largest works the artist ever produced, and the largest to come to auction in thirty-five years. It dates to the brief period, from 1882 to 1884, when Pissarro lived in the village of Osny outside Paris, where in the spring of 1883 he painted en plein air alongside a young Paul Gauguin, then just beginning to absorb the loose brushwork and structural color that Pissarro, often called the father of Impressionism, would pass on to a generation of younger painters. Executed on a scale and with an ambition typically reserved for Salon painting, the work elevates an unassuming rural view, a farmhouse and its surrounding fields, to a scene of quiet dignity, in keeping with Pissarro's lifelong conviction that rural labor and landscape merited the same seriousness as history painting. Before entering Armand Hammer's collection, the painting belonged to Huntington Hartford, the same collector whose holdings once included Mary Cassatt's Summertime.

Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky
The Naval Blockade of Crete
1897
Estimate: £2 – £3 million

Sotheby's Old Master & 19th Century Paintings Evening Auction, London, December 2026

Painted in 1897, the year of both the artist's eightieth birthday and the sixtieth anniversary of his first painting, The Naval Blockade of Crete is the most significant painting from Aivazovsky's final decade to come to auction. Born to an Armenian family in the port city of Feodosia on the Crimean Coast of the Black Sea, Aivazovsky followed contemporary affairs closely throughout his life and felt a particular sympathy for the Greek cause; here, he turns to the international blockade of Crete that followed an uprising against Ottoman rule. Rather than depicting battle, the artist instead trains his attention on light and water, with a Greek flag catching wind in the foreground beneath a sky lit by the rising sun, a quiet composition that reads as much as a meditation on hope as on conflict. The painting once hung in one of Armand Hammer's own offices, and was famously photographed there alongside President Jimmy Carter in the 1980s.

“Ivan Aivazovsky's unmatched talent for depicting the sea in all its states and the effect of light reflecting on water, brought him fame and recognition during his lifetime, not only in Russia, but all over Europe. Today, paintings by this leading seascape painter remain highly sought-after by collectors from around the world. The impressive scale, dramatic composition and vivid colour palette make The Naval Blockade of Crete the most exciting painting from the last decade of the artist's career to ever come to auction. Dr. Armand Hammer's life was inextricably linked with Russia and Russian art, and it is a immense honor and privilege to bring to market such a superb painting from his personal collection, by one of the greatest Russian painters of all time." -- Reto Barmettler, Consultant, Russian Pictures