The summer auction season here began at Christie’s on Tuesday night when a standing-room-only crowd of dealers, collectors and art lovers came from all over the world to watch and bid on one of the largest London sales the auction house has held. Early in the evening a record price for a Monet, $80.4 million, was set for one of the rarest of his waterlilies.

A sea of hands shot in the air when that painting, Le Bassin aux Nymphéas, which had been expected to sell for $36 million (Rs 150 crore) to $47 million (Rs 200 crore), came up on the block. Among at least six would-be buyers, a blond woman in the front row bid tenaciously against several Christie’s representatives on the telephone with clients. When the price hit nearly $70 million (Rs 299 crore), Christopher Burge, Christie’s honourary chairman in the United States and one of the evening’s two auctioneers, leaned over and said to the woman, “Take as long as you like.” The woman, identified as Tania Buckrell Pos of Arts & Management International, a London company, ended up winning the painting on behalf of an unknown client, and the salesroom burst into applause. The previous record for a Monet, $41.4 million (Rs 177 crore) for The Railroad Bridge at Argenteuil, was set last month at Sotheby’s in New York.

Le Bassin aux Nymphéas, from 1919, a large horizontal work measuring more than 3 feet x 6 feet, is from a series of four that Monet signed and dated and that experts consider to be among the most important paintings from his late period. Unlike most of his late works, which remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1926, this series was sold by him. One is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; another was cut in two; and a third is in a private collection, having been sold at Christie’s in New York in 1992 for $12.1 million (Rs 51 crore), a stellar price at the time.

The Monet up for auction Tuesday belonged to J Irwin and Xenia S Miller, collectors from Columbus, Ind. Miller, the chairman of the Cummins Engine Company who died in 2004, and Miller, who died in February, helped transform Columbus into a showcase for modern architecture by supporting historic buildings and projects.

In addition to the Monet, the Millers also owned a Cubist Picasso, another popular work in the auction. La Carafe (Bouteille et Verre),” painted in the winter of 1911-12, went to a telephone bidder for $7.3 million (Rs 31 crore).

The Miller collection was the highlight of an otherwise bumpy auction. The evening sale totalled $284 million (Rs 1.2 billion). Of the 81 works offered, 15 failed to sell. After the collection went on the block, the energy in the salesroom dissipated, with some of the lower-priced works selling below their estimates or not at all. —The New York Times