The 10 Most Expensive Monet Paintings Ever Sold at Auction

Monet's most expensive painting is Meules, a haystack canvas from 1890 that sold for $110.7 million at Sotheby's New York on May 14, 2019. Six bidders chased it for eight minutes. When the hammer came down it was the first Impressionist picture ever to pass $100 million at auction, and nothing by Monet has come close since.

Below it, the list gets crowded. Nine more canvases have sold for between $56 million and $85 million, and every one of them belongs to the series Monet painted from 1890 onward: haystacks, views of London, and above all the water lilies at Giverny. That pattern is worth keeping in mind if you're looking at the Monet paintings people want on their own walls, because the pictures collectors fight over are the same ones everybody recognizes.

How the ranking works: every price includes the buyer's premium (the fee the auction house adds on top of the hammer price), in dollars on the night of the sale, with no inflation adjustment. Each painting appears once. One of them has sold twice in four years, and it's counted at the higher price.

Ten prices, highest first

Yes, three different paintings share the title Le bassin aux nymphéas. Monet reused titles freely, so the year is what tells them apart.

The top ten, one sale at a time

1. Meules (1890): $110.7 million

Monet turned fifty on November 14, 1890, and three days later he bought the house at Giverny. The farm field on the west side of the property is where the haystacks stood, and he painted them again and again.

This canvas hadn't been at auction since 1986. On the night it crossed $100 million, the exact figure was $110,747,000, more than 44 times what it fetched the last time it sold. That's the number every later Monet gets measured against.

2. Nymphéas en fleur (c. 1914–1917): $84.7 million

The Rockefeller sale at Christie's in May 2018 was a once-in-a-generation event, and this was one of its stars. Peggy and David Rockefeller's water lily canvas, 160.3 × 180 cm, went for $84,687,500, second that evening only to a Picasso at $115 million.

If you've only seen the water lilies as a postcard or poster, the scale is the surprise. These late pond pictures are big, and the paint sits thick and loose, closer to abstraction than to the tidy Impressionism of the 1870s.

3. Meule (1891): $81.4 million

A single haystack this time, and the result that finally broke the 2008 record. Christie's sold it in New York on November 16, 2016, for $81,447,500 after five bidders fought for fourteen minutes. Brooke Lampley, who ran the auction house's Impressionist department, called it "the culminating work in a series of 25 from 1890-1891 and a direct precursor to the famed 'Water Lilies' cycle."

That's the case for the haystacks in one line. They're where Monet started painting the same motif over and over, and the water lilies are where that habit ended up.

4. Le bassin aux nymphéas (1919): $80.5 million

For eight years this was the Monet record. Christie's London sold the 1919 pond picture on June 24, 2008, for £40,921,250 ($80,451,178), from the estate of J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller. It was the highest price Christie's had ever reached for a work of art in Europe, and it carried the whole evening to £144,440,500.

Look at the date. That sale happened months before the financial crash, and it still holds up in the top five today.

5. Le Parlement, soleil couchant (1900–1903): $75.9 million

The higher of the two London pictures on the list. Anne H. Bass bought it in the early 1980s, and it hung for decades in her Fifth Avenue apartment before Christie's offered it on May 12, 2022. Estimated at $40–60 million, it hammered at $66 million and finished at $75.9 million with fees.

The same night, two more of her Monets sold: a poplar picture for $36.4 million and a water lily canvas that shows up at number ten below.

6. Le bassin aux nymphéas (c. 1917–1919): $74 million

This one came out of a family that had owned it for about fifty years, and it had never been offered at auction. At Christie's New York on November 9, 2023, it sailed past its $65 million estimate and sold for $74,010,000.

Fresh to market is worth a lot at this level. Buyers pay extra for a picture nobody has priced before.

7. Le bassin aux nymphéas (c. 1917–1919): $70.4 million

Another view of his lily pond at Giverny, from the same late years. Sotheby's New York sold it on May 12, 2021, for $70.4 million, with the hammer around $61 million. The same canvas had fetched $16.8 million in 2004, so it roughly quadrupled in seventeen years.

8. Nymphéas (c. 1914–1917): $65.5 million

Sydell Miller owned this water lily canvas for about 25 years. When Sotheby's sold her collection in New York on November 18, 2024, the Monet drew 34 bids over seventeen minutes before landing at $65.5 million.

9. Waterloo Bridge, soleil voilé (1899–1903): $64.5 million

Paul Allen bought this London bridge at Christie's in November 1997 for $8.2 million. Christie's sold the Microsoft co-founder's collection in November 2022, and the Monet hammered at $56 million, $64.5 million with fees.

That sounds like a triumph, and for Allen's estate it was. But the estimate had been "in excess of $60 million," and the hammer fell short of it. Even a record-breaking sale has soft spots.

10. Nymphéas (1907): $56.5 million

The third Bass Monet, a nearly square water lily picture of 93.7 × 89.5 cm. Christie's sold it on May 12, 2022, estimated at $35–55 million, for a hammer of $49 million and about $56.5 million with fees.

Then it came back. On June 24, 2026, Sotheby's London sold it again, estimated at £30–40 million, for £40.76 million, or $54 million. That's roughly $2.5 million less than four years earlier. Monet prices at this level aren't a one-way bet, whatever the headlines suggest.

The sales that just missed

A few results sit right under the cutoff, and they tell you where the floor is for a major late Monet.

• Nymphéas, Sotheby's London, June 23, 2014: £31,722,500 ($54,071,001) against an estimate of £20–30 million. At the time it was the second-highest price ever paid for a Monet.
• Nymphéas (1907), Christie's New York, November 17, 2025: $45.48 million. The same canvas had sold at Sotheby's in 1985 for $1.65 million.
• Peupliers au bord de l'Epte, crépuscule (1891), Christie's New York, May 12, 2025: $42.96 million, estimated at $30–50 million. Durand-Ruel bought it from Monet in January 1892, and this was its first time at auction.
• Meules à Giverny (1893), Sotheby's New York, May 2024: $34.8 million after an eight-minute contest.

How much is a real Monet painting worth?

A real Monet oil sells for anything from a few million dollars to more than $100 million. The late series pictures (water lilies, haystacks, poplars, London) usually land between $35 million and $85 million, with one haystack at $110.7 million. Earlier and quieter landscapes sell for far less.

A good example of the lower tier: Vétheuil, effet du matin, painted in 1901 and kept out of sight for about a hundred years, sold at Sotheby's Paris on April 16, 2026. It was estimated at €6–8 million and made €10.2 million, a record for France. The same evening, Les Îles de Port-Villez from 1883 brought €6.45 million. If you like that softer side of him, his garden painting from Vétheuil is a good place to start.

What pushes a price up

Two things, mostly. The first is the series: every painting in the top ten is a haystack, a London view or a water lily, the motifs Monet repeated until they became his signature. The second is the name on the provenance. Rockefeller, Bass, Allen and Miller are the kind of owners that make bidders feel safe, and six of the ten came to auction with a famous collection attached.

Being fresh to the market helps too, as the 2023 sale showed. And condition and size count, since the big late canvases always beat the small ones.

The ones that will never be sold

The Monets most people could name are already in museums, and museums rarely sell. The Metropolitan Museum bought the 1867 garden scene at Sainte-Adresse in 1967, and it's still there. The little harbor picture that named Impressionism belongs to the Musée Marmottan in Paris. If you're curious how that painting started everything, there's a longer piece on why Monet gets called the father of the movement.

So the auction list above is only half the story. It ranks the Monets that happened to come up for sale, and several of his best-loved pictures never will. For the wider picture beyond Monet, see the paintings people ask about most, artist by artist.

A water lily for the living room

None of these canvases is coming to a living room near you, but the paintings themselves can. Art & See's painters copy Monet by hand, in oil on canvas. Browse every Monet the studio paints by hand and pick the pond, the haystack or the harbor you'd actually want to look at every day.

Sources

• Sotheby's: Monet's Meules sells for $110.7 million
• Sotheby's: fall 2024 auction results
• Antiques and The Arts Weekly: Meule at Christie's, 2016
• The Art Newspaper: Sotheby's May 2021 sales
• The Art Newspaper: the Paul Allen evening sale
• France 24: Le bassin aux nymphéas, 2023
• franceinfo: Vétheuil, effet du matin, 2026
• The Met: Garden at Sainte-Adresse