Double &Triple

When Claude Monet painted The Terrace at Ste. Adresse in 1866, he was a young unknown of 25, visiting at the family villa outside Le Havre. There he painted his father sunning on a poppy-laden terrace with pennants flapping overhead and the bustling harbor beyond. To critics today, the painting's brilliant colors seem to mark a historic moment, the "thrusting open of French doors to the whole world of light outside." But the fashion of the 1860s was for brownish landscapes of the Barbizon school; Monet was able to sell his work for only $41. Six years later, his Sunrise: An Impression created a furor in Paris and gave its name to a new school of art, impressionism.

In 1926, The Terrace caught the eye of the Rev. Theodore Pitcairn, a Swedenborgian pastor from Bryn Athyn, Pa., and an heir to the Pittsburgh Plate Glass fortune. Pitcairn, now 74, who explains with a twinkle that he selects paintings not for investment but because "I have a feeling for them," bought the Monet from a Manhattan gallery for $11,000. Last week The Terrace was up for auction at Christie's in London on behalf of Pitcairn's Beneficia Foundation. The winning bid of $1,410,000 by London Art Dealer Geoffrey Agnew was nearly triple the record auction price for a Monet and almost double that for any impressionist painting. The new auction high also firmed up the floor under top impressionist paintings. The price was right in line with the estimated $1,400,000 that London's National Gallery paid privately in 1964 for Cezanne's Bathers.

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