The Eight-Figure Auction Lots to Watch in New York Next Week

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La Femme aux lilas (1876/1877)

Held by the same family for 87 years, this luminous Renoir carries with it the legacy of one of the most distinguished collecting dynasties of 20th-century New York. Over the course of four decades, Joan Whitney Payson—a formidable businesswoman who co-founded the New York Mets in 1962, becoming the first woman to own and operate a major American sports team—and her husband, Charles Shipman Payson, assembled an exceptional collection centered on works by Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin and Picasso, while also encompassing Old Masters such as Rembrandt, Holbein and El Greco, alongside key American painters from Homer to Wyeth. Joan Whitney Payson later bequeathed a significant portion of the collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where several galleries are named in her honor.

First acquired by the Paysons in 1929 for $100,000, the painting now returns to the market with a $25-35 million estimate—one of the finest Renoirs to appear at auction in the past century. It is being consigned by their daughter, who is heir to this legacy of exceptional collectors and prominent New Yorkers, and a member of the Whitney Payson family, as well as a great-niece by marriage of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney in New York.

The painting carries all the signature grace of Renoir’s celebration of female beauty and gentle presence. The subject is Nini Lopez, a young actress from Montmartre and one of Renoir’s favored models between 1874 and 1877, captured in a moment of quiet introspection, clutching a voluminous bouquet of lilacs in full bloom, their delicacy and luminosity echoed in her youthful presence. Nini appeared in more than 20 of his works in various guises, including the iconic La Loge (1874), now held at The Courtauld Institute in London. The figure and her interior setting are rendered with the same rapid, delicate brushstrokes, as Renoir achieves a masterful synthesis of light and harmonious color across the canvas.