Enfilade

Left: Jean-Baptiste Greuze, A Girl Weeping over Her Dead Bird, detail, 1757, oil on oval canvas, 71 × 60 cm (estimate: $600,000–800,000; sold for $2,470,000). Center: Benoist Gerard, Louis XV Meissen and French porcelain-mounted ormolu and tole peinte mantel clock, 1740, porcelain, ormolu, 54 × 38 × 17 cm (estimate: $50,000–80,000; sold for $75,600). Right: Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, Portrait of the Artist’s Daughter, Jeanne-Julie-Louise Le Brun, Playing a Guitar, detail, oil on canvas, 100 × 83 cm (estimate: $300,000–500,000; sold for $441,000).

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From the press release, detailing sale highlights, via Art Daily:

A Park Avenue Collection, Sale #23048
Christie’s New York, 17 April 2024

Christie’s made strong results for a single-owner sale that featured a rich array of 18th-century French furniture, Old Master paintings and drawings, and Chinese works of art. A Park Avenue Collection totaled $8,890,582, which was 130 percent above the low estimate, with 79 percent of lots sold. There were outstanding results across categories. The top lot of the sale was an Old Master painting, Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Girl Weeping over Her Dead Bird (Une jeune fille qui pleure la mort de son oiseau), which made $2,470,000, setting a new world record for the artist and more than doubling the prior record set in 2013. The top furniture lot was a pair of late Louis XVI ormolu-mounted ebony, ebonized, and boulle marquetry meubles d’appui, which brought $176,400. A Chinese famille verte porcelain rouleau vase of the Kangxi Period (1662–1722) topped the Chinese offerings at $151,200. A drawing by Michelangelo, which received worldwide attention, made $201,600, more than 33 times its low estimate of $6,000.

Deputy Chairman for English Furniture and Works of Art, William Strafford, said, “The outstanding results of today’s sale pay tribute to this collector’s connoisseurship and passionate pursuit of rare treasures in so many fields during over 40 years of collecting.”

Specialist for Old Masters, Joshua Glazer, said, “The superb group of French 18th-century paintings in the collection were universally admired, and we were thrilled to have set a new world auction record for the magnificent Greuze, Girl Weeping over Her Dead Bird.”

More information is available from this preview article from Christie’s»