NEW YORK—Christie's May 21 American art sale brought in $72.6 million, the highest amount the house has ever earned from a sale in the category. The auction set a new record for a 19th-century American painting with the sale of Thomas Moran's landscape Green River of Wyoming to Pennsylvania's Avery Galleries for $17.7 million against a pre-sale estimate of $3–5 million. The record was previously held by John Singer Sargent's Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife, which fetched $8.8 million in 2004.

Marsden Hartley's recently rediscovered Lighthouse also set a record, in the American Modernism category, going for $6.31 million to an anonymous phone bidder. Georgia O'Keeffe's Calla Lilies with Red Anemone previously held the record, having brought in $6.17 million at Christie's in 2001.