Monet’s Peupliers au Bord de l’epte, Crépuscule Highlights Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale

From Monet’s highly coveted Les Peupliers series, this painting features a powerful palette of sunset hues, in a striking vertical orientation measuring more than three feet (one full meter) high. The work has exceptional provenance, with a rich and varied international exhibition history, having first been exhibited the year after it was created in the Monet exhibition, Série des peuplier des bords de l’Epte from February – March 1892. The painting’s first owner was the legendary dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who acquired the work in 1892 and within whose family collection it remained until 1955. It now comes to auction from a private collection, where it has been for over 60 years. This April, Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule will be unveiled in Taipei before returning to New York ahead of the auction on May 12.  

Vanessa Fusco, Head of Impressionist and Modern Art, Christie’s New York, remarks, “Dating to Monet’s breakthrough decade of the 1890s during which he would come to define his great series of the Poplars, Grainstacks, Cathedrals, and ultimately the Waterlilies through a serial methodology, this painting stands out as one of the most exquisite examples of the Peupliers subject. With its striking register of warm and cool jewel tones, suspended on the edge of a moment where the glory of sunset turns to dusk, it is Monet at his best. After being cherished for multiple generations in a family collection and being generously lent to Museum exhibitions around the world, we are honored to present this Impressionist masterpiece as a cornerstone of Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale.” 

The 24 canvases comprising Monet’s Peupliers series were created during the spring, summer and fall of 1891 in Giverny and have since become among the most celebrated works in the Impressionist master’s great oeuvre. Nine examples from the series are now included in the permanent collections of many of the world’s most important art institutions including the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Tate in London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo. The painting on offer has most recently been on view at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where it has hung for over thirty years.  The present work is particularly remarkable within this series, employing a richly nuanced color palette of soft purples and pinks, blues and greens, to capture a dreamlike quality of vibrating and shifting light during a very specific moment between day and night.  

Main Image: CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926) Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule, oil on canvas, 39 x 25 in. (100 x 65.1 cm.), Painted in 1891, Estimate $30 million – 50 million