Bacon and Monet Landscapes to Lead Christie’s Evening Sale in London

Christie’s big 20th and 21st century art sales in London this year will be led by two landscapes: a dynamic and passionate Francis Bacon and a wistful Monet, both of which have not been seen at auction in quite some time.

The Bacon, Landscape near Malabata, Tangier (1963), is estimated at £15 million-£20 million. It was painted as a tribute to Peter Lacy, with whom the artist had a years-long passionate, and often abusive, relationship. 

Bacon made the painting in London, just one year after Lacy died tragically in Tangiers at 46. The painting has remained in the same collection for more than 20 years. When it last sold at auction, at Sotheby’s New York for $517,000 in 1985, it became the most expensive Bacon ever sold. (Today, Bacon’s auction record is for the 1969 picture Three Studies of Lucian Freud, which sold at Christie’s New York for $142.4 million in 2013.)

The Bacon painting was originally sold by Marlborough Gallery in 1963 and, according to Christie’s, has been on view in 32 exhibitions across 27 cities worldwide, including the 1971–72 retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris and the Royal Academy of Arts’s “Francis Bacon: Man and Beast” in 2022.

Monet’s Matinée sur la Seine, temps net (1897) is among the 21 pictures that make up the artist’s “Mornings on the Seine” series. Each work in it focuses of the same section of the famous river at different times of the day. 

Estimated to bring in £12 million-£18 million, Matinée sur la Seine, temps net is coming to auction for the first time in 45 years. 

The work was made in Monet’s bateau-atelier (studio-boat) in the middle of the river that snaked through Giverny, the countryside village where Monet created some of his most recognized works, including the “Nymphéas” (Water Lilies) series.

Matinée sur la Seine, temps net was last exhibited in 1990 as part of the “Monet in the ‘90s: The Series Paintings,” held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

The Bacon painting will be on display at Christie’s New York through February 19, and both pictures will be on display at Christie’s London from March 1 through 7.