Art Painting Le bassin aux nympheas, one of four pieces from the French impressionist’s water lily series, almost doubled the previous record price for a Monet, the £20.9 million for his 1873 work Le Pont du Chemin de Fer a Argenteuil which sold in May. The Monet canvas, which was displayed in front of a packed auction house, was sold to a telephone bidder. The signed and dated 1919 painting has only been seen in Unlike most of his later works which remained unfinished in his studio after his death, the water-lily series was completed in his lifetime. One is in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, another was divided and a third is in a private collection. Before the auction, Olivier Camu, Christie’s director and head of Impressionist and Modern Art, described it as “the greatest of Claude Monet’s water-lily pictures to be offered at auction in Europe”. It was the star lot of Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale that also featured works by Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Renoir, Degas and Henry Moore. The sale was initially expected to fetch £90 million but – as has become familiar in auction rooms this summer – that was set to be easily exceeded. Talk at Christie’s was of petro-dollars from Russia and the Middle East pushing prices yet higher and higher. A world record was also set for a work by British sculptor Henry Moore with his piece Draped Reclining Woman selling for just under £4.3million. public once in the last 80 years Monet was born on November …