Claude Monet's Impressionist painting of his wife in a meadow became the third highest priced work at auction Tuesday, going for $24.59 million to an anonymous telephone bidder, Sotheby's said. The price for ``Dans La Prairie'' (``In the Meadow'') broke the record for a Monet set 24 hours earlier at Christie's, which sold his painting of a blue house for $6.55 million, also to an anonymous telephone bidder. The two sales of Impressionist and modern paintings and sculpture by the rival firms totaled nearly $123.5 million. Sotheby's also sold a Monet landscape for $2 million and set a record price for Pierre Bonnard, whose painting of a woman in her bath fetched $3.78 million. A picture of two women musicians by Henri Matisse sold for $2.83 million. Only one buyer of works realizing more than 1 million pounds ($1.72 million) was identified: Japan's Fujii Gallery paid $2.17 million for Pierre-Auguste Renoir's portrait of a young woman in a yellow hat. ``The picture of his wife was Monet's most important work to appear on the market for 20 years,'' said Sotheby's expert, Michel Strauss. ``There was ferocious bidding which lasted for five minutes between two people on the telephone and no one in the saleroom appeared to be bidding while it was going on,'' said Fiona Ford, Sotheby's spokeswoman. Auctioneer Julian Barran opened the bidding at $6.8 million after Sotheby's had estimated the picture to be worth around $10.3 million. The highest auction prices have been paid for flower paintings by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh. His ``Irises'' sold to an anonymous buyer at Sotheby's in New York last November for $53.9 million. Van Gogh's ``Sunflowers'' was bought by a Japanese insurance company at Christie's in London in March 1987 for $39.85 million. Monet, a Frenchman known as the father of Impressionism and the greatest master of that style, painted his wife in 1876 when they were living at Argenteuil near Paris. The summery picture depicts Camille in a white dress and hat, with a parasol behind her, reading a book as she lies among tall grass and wild flowers. The picture was sold by trustees of the estate of the late David David-Weill, an art collector who bought it about 1938 in Paris from the art dealers, Wildenstein.
