Water Lilies

In November 2012 a boarding school in Tarrytown, just north of New York City, sent this painting to auction at Christie's. The Hackley School had received it as a bequest from Ethel Strong Allen, widow of the Wall Street executive Herbert Allen Sr., together with a landscape by Camille Pissarro and one by Alfred Sisley. The Monet was the top lot of the evening and sold for $43,762,500. It shows the lily pond in his garden at Giverny and is signed and dated 1905 in the lower right corner. That was the year Monet settled into his most intensive stretch of work on the pond, and he would paint dozens more views of it over the following years. The three bequeathed pictures together raised nearly $51 million for the school.