Gustave Caillebotte’s final painting in a series of four portraits of Richard Gallo, his good friend and most frequently portrayed figure, Richard Gallo et son chien Dick, au Petit-Gennevilliers sold for $19.7 million. The 1894 work is the only example of Caillebotte’s renderings of Gallo remaining in private hands and epitomizes Impressionist portraiture and landscape painting on an impressive scale. Gallo was the Egyptian-born son of a French banker who settled in Paris in 1869 and befriended the artist at school. Gallo would go on to become the editor of the newspaper Le Constitutionnel and maintained his friendship with Caillebotte and his brother Martial for years to follow. While little more is known about Gallo, the frequency with which he is portrayed in Caillebotte’s oeuvre stands as a testament to the pair’s lasting friendship. The other three portraits of Gallo by Caillebotte currently reside in museum collections.

The largest and most vivid of the 12 works that comprise Paul Signac’s Istanbul series, La Corne d'Or (Constantinople) from 1907 achieved $16.2 million. Depicting a lush, textural surface comprised of rectangular brushstrokes, the painting captures the grandeur, history and unique quality of light and color that filled the ancient city and once belonged to the Cachin-Signac family for 70 years. Francoise Cachin was the leading Signac expert and author of the artist’s catalogue raisonnée, as well as director of the Museums of France.

One of the earliest works featuring René Magritte’s favored stone motif, La Légende des siècles from 1950, surpassed the $6 million high estimate to sell for $8.6 million in its auction debut, having been held in the same family collection since it was gifted by Magritte to a friend of his brother, Jean Debernardi. The work is the third and most complex oil version on this theme that Magritte painted in 1950; the largest of the three versions is in the collection of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.

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