Claude Monet’s Long-Hidden ‘Iris’ Is About to Become the Most Expensive Painting Ever Auctioned in France

The artwork reflects the famed Impressionist’s later, abstract style. Sotheby’s estimates that it will sell for $25 million to $34 million

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

September 22, 2026 3:12 p.m.

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A never-before-seen painting by Claude Monet, the French Impressionist behind such masterpieces as Water Lilies and Impression, Sunrise, is headed for the auction block in France. According to a statement from the auction house Sotheby’s, Iris is estimated to sell for at least $25 million—more than any other painting ever auctioned in the country. 

Painted in 1924 or ’25 and measuring about five by six feet, Iris is among the largest artworks Monet produced in the final decade of his career. Long held in a private collection and known to outsiders only through black-and-white photographs, the remarkably preserved artwork is now on display at Sotheby’s Paris, in its first public appearance. 

“The painting has never been damaged or varnished,” Marianne Mathieu, an Impressionism and Monet expert, tells the Associated Press’ Elitsa Gadeva. “Today we are discovering a painting that is classic, exemplary of what Monet would have wanted to show us. It is truly an absolutely moving, important and rare discovery.” 

Iris will lead Sotheby’s massive sale of artworks from the collection of Jeanne Schlumberger, who was married to Marcel Schlumberger, co-founder of the massive energy company now known as SLB. In 1956, through art dealer Katia Granoff, the Schlumbergers acquired Monet’s studio holdings, which he’d bequeathed to his son.

“When Monet died, the unveiling of his works was a big scandal,” Thomas Bompard, Sotheby’s senior international specialist, tells the Art Newspaper’s Anny Shaw. “Some critics said it was artistic suicide, that these were the works of a blind artist, or of a senile old man.” 

Born in 1840, Monet began his artistic career in Paris in the 1860s. Over time, in the company of contemporaries such as Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley, Monet developed a smudgy, plein air style of painting. In 1872, he captured a Normandy seaport in Impression, Sunrise, which later gave the art movement he had pioneered—Impressionism—its name. He went on to paint the series Haystacks, The Houses of Parliament, Water Lilies and Irises. Monet died in 1926, at 86 years old. 

“He painted a fragment of reality to give an idea of the immensity of the world. It’s not a description of a garden, but a world of painting,” Mathieu, a former curator at Musée Marmottan Monet, tells Artnet’s Richard Whiddington. “Iris is an example of the ultimate work of Monet: to give a new definition of what painting must be.”

The Schlumbergers purchased four Monet paintings, which have “remained out of public view since their creation,” per Sotheby’s statement. These include Iris; Weeping Willow (1918-19); The House Through the Roses (1925-26); and The Seine at Vernon, the Tree (1894). All will be sold in October, alongside paintings and sculptures by Paul Cézanne, Gustave Courbet and Camille Claudel. 

The Schlumberger collection is well known in the art world, but very few people have seen its works, Bompard tells the AP. He says it’s an extraordinary collection, in part, because of the personality of its architect. 

“Jeanne was pretty wild,” Bompard tells the Art Newspaper. “She had a visionary eye. She didn’t like classic Impressionism; she liked Soutine, and she liked the monumental late Monets, which were considered the first abstract paintings, with their very gestural and dramatic brushstrokes of pure color.” 

Sonja Anderson is a daily correspondent for Smithsonian magazine who covers art, archaeology and culture, from newly discovered artifacts to the latest art heists.