Claude Monet’s Matinée sur la Seine, temps net (1897) will be a highlight Christie’s 20th/21st Century evening sale in London on March 7. At auction for the first time in 45 years the work which captures a tranquil moment on The Seine with morning light casting a glow is estimated at £12-£18 million. The series to which the painting belongs, titled ‘Matinées sur la Seine’, conveys the landscape during the summer mornings of 1896 and 1897 as the light transforms the atmosphere. Tracing the sun as it passes over the scene, from the first rays of light at dawn, to the full brilliance of the sun at mid-morning, this extraordinary sequence of works was conceived as a connected, interrelated sequence of canvases. These would become some of the last scenes the artist would create of the Seine, a frequent subject in his oeuvre and one of the defining images of the Impressionist movement.