Though last night’s 20th Century Evening Sale at Christie’s, the first of New York City’s fall marquee week, was by all accounts a successful auction, there were not many surprises. It was not exactly shocking that the night’s top lot, a desirable flame-colored Rothko from the Weis Collection, went for $62 million. Few eyebrows were raised when Matisse’s “Figure et bouquet (Tete ocre),” already requested by MoMA for a show next year, climbed from $10 million to $13 million in seconds, eventually fetching three times that. But the energy shifted when Lot 19, a 14-by-20-inch watercolor by John Singer Sargent, finally hammered at $6 million ($7.2 million with fees) with a buyer in the room, culminating a dextrous four-minute show of patience and humor by auctioneer Adrien Meyer. “Look at it,” he instructed a bidder on the floor at one point, signaling to an image of the work on the screen behind him. After he struck the gavel, people clapped; one person hooted.
The sale of “Gondolier’s Siesta” (1902–03), which set a new record for a work on paper by the artist, accounted for just one percent of the auction’s $690 million total. Yet it briefly disrupted the narrative of market doom and gloom, rarely punctuated by anything other than splashy big-ticket items, proving that collectors are still willing to wave their paddles for an exquisite little specimen that checks the boxes of provenance, condition, and quality.
“Many Sargent watercolors, rather like Matisse oils, are wonderful, but they have a small imperfection or flaw,” said the winning bidder, art advisor Ray Waterhouse on behalf of a private client, in a phone call from a taxi on his way back to Christie’s this morning.
“The Matisse might have slightly unbeautiful hands or arms. We are not asking for perfection,” he continued. “But this was just perfect in every way.”
Waterhouse said his client, a collector of American art whose name and location he would not disclose, was willing to guarantee the work for $4 million, a generous offer that topped the previous record for a Sargent work on paper (in 2022, also at Christie’s). The consignor politely declined.
“They were confident it would do well,” Waterhouse said.
The view of the saleroom at Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale on November 17, 2025 (photo Valentina Di Liscia/Hyperallergic)
The piece was one of just 21 works in the 80-lot sale that went under the hammer without a guarantee. Coming directly from the collection of Montclair Art Museum patrons Carol and Terry Wall, it had never been offered on the public market, but it had sold privately for about the same price, Waterhouse noted. “I know the person who had sold it to the consignor. He raved about it as the best Venetian watercolor he’d ever seen. We agreed. And so we bid strongly.”
Sargent produced hundreds of watercolors, many of them exploring two of his fixations: Venice and the men who steered gondolas through its iconic winding canals. The present composition portrays its two subjects in a rare moment of repose, one of them reclining gently in his boat. Christie’s Head of American Art Tylee Abbott said the work was notable for its juxtaposition of architectural views and human figures and its bravura treatment of a “notably unforgiving” medium, deftly tackling the minutiously rendered details of a Palladian façade and the loose, confident washes of the water’s reflection.
“Watercolors were an important part of bringing Sargent to America,” Abbott said. Born in Italy to American parents, the artist was already a rising star in Europe by the time his “Portrait of Madame X” caused a stir at the 1884 Paris Salon. But a 1909 exhibition in New York City spurred a sort of “gold rush” for his Venetian watercolors in the United States, Abbott explained. The Brooklyn Museum acquired 83 works from the show, followed by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which purchased 45 works from the next exhibition while the Metropolitan Museum of Art moved quickly to catch up.
Christie’s auctioneer Adrien Meyer skilfully draws out bids for Sargent’s watercolor. (screenshot via Christie’s on Youtube)
This year is the 100th anniversary of Sargent’s birth, celebrated in major exhibitions at The Met, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and elsewhere at a key moment for the American artist’s contemporary resurgence. “Sargent went into an eclipse shortly after his death and until the 1980s,” Paul Fisher, a biographer of Sargent and professor of American Studies at Wellesley College, told Hyperallergic. “People thought of him as the painter of choice for plutocrats and aristocrats, or as old-fashioned, even though he was in his generation a very modern painter in Paris.” The postmodern period saw a reappraisal of the painter’s legacy, led largely by his grandnephew Richard Ormon; today, Sargent is officially having a moment.
Though Fisher could not comment on the market value of “Siesta,” he described it as “one of the most unusual paintings” he’d come across from Sargent’s series depicting gondoliers. In addition to being a popular working-class subject, gondoliers were “the sex symbol of the late 19th-century,” Fisher said, “they were outdoorsy, they were independent, they were scoundrely, people projected all kinds of things on them.” But this work stands out from others for its evocation of quiet and stillness rather than dynamic movement.
“There are lots of [watercolors] of rowing figures with their poles, but this is more of an intimate view, almost a personal view,” Fisher continued. “We have the two gondoliers lounging in their gondolas, with this marvelous vista of Venice in the background … It’s very evocative and luminous.”
Abbott at Christie’s admitted that as someone who works with historical American art, his “material” typically attracts fewer headlines than that of other departments. When a truly great work gets its due, he said, it’s a special moment. (Another work on paper by the artist sold today for $304,000 at Christie’s Day sale, tripling its high estimate.)
Sargent was a prolific artist. The complete catalogue raisonné of his paintings is in nine volumes. Watercolors by the painter are by no means rare.
“There is a John Singer Sargent watercolor sold in almost every auction, every year,” Abbott said. “But how many like this are left? Very, very few, if any. It’s a singular work.”
