NEW YORK – Christie’s is pleased to announce A Park Avenue Collection, a sale of almost 270 lots from the Park Avenue home of a European collector. The sale will take place live, at Christie’s Rockefeller Center, over a morning and an afternoon session, on 17 April 2024. Representing the passion of more than 40 years collecting, this sale offers a rich array of 18th century French furniture, Old Master paintings and drawings and Chinese works of art. Many great collectors can be found in the provenance of objects in the sale, including Jayne Wrightsman, Florence Gould, Champalimaud, Elizabeth Parke Firestone, Sir Richard Wallace, J. Paul Getty, perhaps the earliest American collector of French furniture Gouverneur Morris, as well as the Vienna, Paris, and London branches of the Rothschild family.

The collector was forced to flee Hungary with his family in the 1940s and eventually settled in New York. To cross the threshold of his apartment on Park Avenue was to enter a bygone age of elegance, perhaps an attempt by the collector to recreate the lost world of his childhood. Richly mounted furniture was in every corner, candelabra glistened on every surface and a remarkable profusion of paintings and works on paper ranging from the Dutch Golden Age to French Impressionist and European modernism were hung salon style throughout the apartment. His strongest passion though was for 18th-century France and each room in the apartment was imbued with that spirit and arranged to evoke the formal groupings of the dix-huitième siècle.

Christie’s will offer further works from this collection during the 20/21 Marquee Week sales in May, in New York. Highlights include, Claude Monet’s 1886 oil on canvas, Prairie à Giverny, with an estimate of $2,000,000 to $3,000,000; Paul Klee’s 1918 watercolor, Stadt der Kirchen, with an estimate of $200,000-300,000; Salvador Dali’s oil on canvas, Madone corpusculaire, with an estimate of $150,000-250,000.