An 1888 Vincent van Gogh painting will be offered at Christie’s in a 20th century art auction in New York on May 13. Titled Le Pont de Trinquetaille (1888), the work is estimated to sell for $25 million–$35 million.

Measuring at 25 inches by 31 inches, the painting was made a year before his suicide at the age of 37 in 1890. It is one of the few landscapes from his coveted Arles period, and it offers a street scene showing the Trinquetaille bridge rendered using the artist’s signature expressive brushwork and warm color palette.

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Sotheby’s three live-streamed evening sales of modern and contemporary art held on Sunday and Monday night in Hong Kong brought in a hammer total of HKD 1.46 billion, or HKD 2.1 billion with premium ($269.8 million), exceeding the collective pre-sale low estimate of HKD 1.4 billion ($179 million), across 91 works sold. Seventeen of those lots were guaranteed at a collected low estimate of HKD 661.5 million ($85.2 million).

The results from this series further indicate the ascendance of the Asian market. The restructuring of the global evening sales, which now include cross-category offerings, seems to have benefited Asia most compared to other sale centers, with this spring season seeing the house’s highest estimated Hong Kong season to date.

The three evening sales devoted to modern and contemporary art featured works by staples like Picasso, Yoshitomo Nara, and Zao Wou-Ki, and Sanyu, as well as Clyfford Still and Gerhard Richter, whose works have seen heightened success on the block in Asia in recent months.

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In a dramatic close to Sotheby’s modern art evening sale in Hong Kong on Sunday, vice chairman Brooke Lampley unveiled a large-scale Claude Monet water lilies painting to the live-streamed auction’s audience. That work, titled Le Bassin aux Nymphéas, is itself now going to be sold by the house. It will hit the block at Sotheby’s New York Impressionist and modern art evening sale on May 12, where it is expected to fetch $40 million.

Monet completed the work between 1917 and 1919, during the last decade of his life. Drawing inspiration from the artist’s Giverny garden, Le Bassin aux Nymphéas is part of a series that commands the artist’s top auction prices. Another work from the series sold at Christie’s in 2008 for £40.9 million ($80.5 million); it had come from the estate of Indiana philanthropists Irwin and Xenia Miller. And in 2018, one from the David Rockefeller collection sold at Christie’s for $84 million.

The last work by Monet of this caliber to sell at auction was Meules, a landscape scene depicting haystacks, which was bought by Hasso Plattner at Sotheby’s in May 2019 for $110 million. If the present work reaches its high estimate, it will be among the top 10 works by the Impressionist ever to be sold at auction.

This is not the first time the work has appeared in a public sale. The seller purchased the work 17 years ago, during a Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art sale, for $16.8 million, against an estimate of $9 million. At the time, it was being sold from the holdings of Los Angeles collectors Fran and Ray Stark. Prior to that, it also passed through the hands of renowned New York Old Masters dealer Richard L. Feigen.

A rare photo album made by Ed van der Elsken sold for $21,250 at an auction in New York, setting a new record the Dutch photographer and filmmaker.

Made ca. 1951, the untitled album comprises 27 black and white photographs depicting Parisian street scenes, as well as portraits of Dutch photographers Emmy Andriesse and Ata Kando (who was married to Elsken). Five bidders competed for the work during a photography sale on March 11 at Swann Galleries in New York, where it was estimated at $10,000–$15,000. Curator Hans Rooseboom at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam purchased it on behalf of the museum.

This is the first time the work has ever been sold on the market. It has been in the Elsken family’s hands for seven decades. The result surpasses the last record for an Elsken photo album at auction, set by his 1962 book of 99 photographs titled Crazy World. That work sold in Haarlem, Netherlands, in November 2013 for $16,300.

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On Thursday in Paris, ahead of a marquee cross-category auction, Sotheby’s held an Impressionist and modern art evening sale that brought in a total of €36.5 million with premium ($43 million). Led by auctioneer Aurélie Vandevoorde, Sotheby’s Paris director of the Impressionist and modern art, the auction realized a sell-through rate of 88 percent across 31 lots sold.

Forty-two percent of the lots sold above the high estimate, 39 percent sold within their estimates, and just 6 percent landed below expectations. Four lots went unsold and two were withdrawn before the sale’s start.

The result surpasses last year’s equivalent sale in Paris that was pushed to June because of the pandemic and brought in a much lower total of €10 million ($11.8 million). This sale also brought in more than the house’s October Paris-based “Modernités” evening auction, which generated €28 million ($33 million).

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