Manet self portrait fetches record £22m
23 Jun 10
One of only two self portraits by French painter Edouard Manet - considered to be father of Impressionism - has been purchased by an anonymous bidder for a record price of more than £22 million at auction.
The Manet A La Palette - which reveals the bowler-hatted artist poised with paint brush in hand - fetched £22,441,250, the highest price achieved for the day at the Impressionist and Modern Art Evening sale at Sotheby's auction house in London.
The sale of the portrait, painted between 1878 and 1879 and ranked amongst the greatest of the Impressionist movement, represents the highest price paid for a picture by the artist. The previous highest price for a Manet was £16 million at an auction in New York in 1989.
The auction at Sotheby's saw around £112 million worth of art going under the hammer.
Arbres a Collioure, a summer landscape by painter Andre Derain, fetched more than £16 million, and Odalisques Jouant Aux Dames, an example of Henri Matisse's orientalist compositions, sold for almost £12 million.
The two French painters are seen as the fathers of the Fauvism movement.
Works by other famous artists such as Picasso, Monet and Munch were also sold at the auction.
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