Asian buyers snap up impressionists

Asian buyers snapped up impressionist paintings at Sotheby's spring auction in New York, buying three of the sale's top five lots, including a Vincent Van Gogh landscape, and making up around one-third of the $368.3m raised.

Art collecting has soared in Asia in recent years, mainly led by a new breed of ultra-wealthy Chinese collecting both classical and contemporary pieces and building private galleries in China.

According to a report by the European Fine Art Foundation, China was the world's joint second largest art market in 2014 with a 22 per cent share of sales, alongside the UK.

Sotheby's sale, which kicked off the spring auctions, saw 69 lots go under the gavel. An unidentified Asian collector paid $66.3m for Van Gogh's "L'Allee des Alyscamps" (pictured), a rich-hued depiction of an autumnal scene painted in 1888 shortly before the Dutch artist sliced off his ear.

The auction, which included five works by Claude Monet, achieved the second-highest result in Sotheby's history for any auction of impressionist and modern art. The November 2014 New York sale brought in $422.1m.

The Van Gogh achieved the highest price at auction for a work by the painter since 1998.

Chinese buyers - like the Japanese before in the late 1980s - are proving big fans of the Dutch painter.

Last November Wang Zhongjun, a Chinese film producer, bought Van Gogh's "Still Life, Vase with Daisies and Poppies", for $61.8m, more than its $30m-to-$50m estimate.

"L'Allee des Alyscamps" last sold for $11.8m in 2003. It was first owned by the proprietors of the cafe where Van Gogh lodged in the city of Arles and was later held in a private collection in Japan.

For over a third of the works it was the first time they had gone on sale in half a century. Others included one of Claude Monet's water lilies series of paintings while his 1905 impressionist painting "Nympheas" sold for $54m.

Pablo Picasso's "Femme au chignon dans un fauteuil" went for $29.93m while Marc Chagall's "Crepuscule ou la maison rouge" was sold for just over $5m.

Other artists whose works were included were Paul Klee, Edgar Degas, Wassily Kandinsky and Rene Magritte.

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