Les Flamants by Henri Rousseau is poised to make a new auction record for the artist when it comes up at Christie’s 20th century evening sale in New York on May 15. Estimated at $20,000,000–30,000,000. – far exceeding the current record of $4.4 million set three decades ago at Christie’s in London – Les Flamants is from the estate of Payne Whitney Middleton. It has been in the family since 1949.
Max Carter, Christie’s Vice Chairman, 20th and 21st Century Art, said: “A legend among the Parisian avant-garde, Henri Rousseau is perhaps the rarest major artist of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Of the fewer than 240 attributed oils in the definitive catalogues by Dora Vallier and Henry Certigny, the number of privately owned paintings with provenance traced to Rousseau can be counted on two hands. Among them there is only one monumental jungle vision, Les Flamants, which hung for many years in Joan Whitney Payson’s living room opposite Van Gogh’s Irises. In 1954, five years after the family acquired Les Flamants, Rousseau’s The Dream reportedly became the most expensive acquisition in MoMA’s history. At the time, one of Rousseau’s masterpieces appearing on the market was an event. Today it is once-in-a-lifetime.”