NEW YORK – 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 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, 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, English Furniture & 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, 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.’”

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.