Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's collection brings record-smashing $1.5bn

A $149.2m Seurat studio scene and $137.7m Cézanne landscape led the 60-lot, white glove sale, while breathtaking Andrew Wyeth garnered six times its high estimate at $20m.

The historic evening took flight with Pablo Picasso’s petite, four-inch-by-six-inch oil, Quatre baigneuses from 1921 that hammered at $2.8m ($3.4m with fees) against an estimate of $600,000-$800,000, and Alexander Calder’s Untitled standing mobile (what he termed a “stabile”) from around 1942 made $6.5m ($7.8m with fees), well past its $3.5m high estimate.

The index card-sized Picasso, like many of its brethren in the sale, bears a sterling provenance—in this instance passing from pioneering American collector John Quinn to film-maker Mike Nichols prior to joining Allen’s collection.

Before the big guns started to fire, Edward Steichen’s gum-bichromate over platinum print from 1905, The Flatiron, capturing the dusk-lit New York City landmark, set an artist record when it hammered for $10m ($11.8m with fees), more than triple its high estimate of $3m—though not quite a new record for the medium. It was the sole photograph in the painting-dominated, ultra-blue-chip lineup.

The appetite for top-class works was ravenous from early on, with the sixth lot, Paul Signac’s Pontillist maritime jewel, Concarneau, calme du matin (Opus no.219, larghetto) from 1891 realising a record with a hammer price of $34m ($39.3m with fees). Allen had acquired it in November 1998 for a then-record $4.4m.

A stunning and storied work by Georges Seurat, Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version) from 1888— featuring a trio of nude models at rest in the artist’s studio with his masterpiece, Un dimanche après-midi à l’île de la Grande Jatte (1884-86) visible in the background—sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for a record hammer price of $130m ($149.2m with fees), far surpassing its unpublished estimate in excess of $100m.

Allen, who died of lymphoma in 2018 at age 65 and who also owned professional sports teams in Seattle and Portland, as well as two museums devoted to pop culture, had acquired the Seurat painting privately for an undisclosed sum in late 1999. It last sold at auction in London in 1970 for approximately $1.1m (including fees), or $8.1m in today’s currency.

The masterpieces kept churning. Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian scene Maternité II (1899), featuring a bare-breasted mother nursing her infant with two companions standing behind her, raced to a $92m ($105.7m with fees). Allen acquired it in November 2004 for a then-record $35m ($39.2m with fees).

If one was to pick a take-home trophy of the highest order from Wednesday’s sale, it could easily have been Paul Cézanne’s iconic landscape, La Montagne Sainte-Victoire (1888-90), which soared to a record hammer price of $120m ($137.7m with fees). The price doubled the Cézanne auction record, which had previously been set by Rideau, cruchon et compôtier back in May 1999, when it fetched $60.5m with fees.

A light-filled and undeniably sexy Andrew Wyeth painting, Day Dream (1980), executed in tempera on panel and depicting a sleeping nude under a mosquito net, took the saleroom by storm. It soared to its ultimate sale price of $20m ($23.2m with fees), a new auction record for the artist and more than six times its high estimate of $3m.

Remarkably still—and unusually for a dispersal of this magnitude—all of the net proceeds will benefit the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation to support philanthropy “pursuant to Mr. Allen’s wishes”