Christie’s Paris is playing host this month to two single-owner sales of distinction. On December 1, the house is auctioning off Jeanne Lanvin’s Impressionist paintings on behalf of the Lanvin-Polignac family. What Christie’s is calling the “most significant collection of Impressionist art offered on the market in France” has been locked away in the family vault since the couturier’s death, in 1958, when her showcase Left Bank apartment was dismantled. Estimated to earn around €20 million ($27 million), the 31 pictures, including works by Bonnard, Boudin, Degas, Pissarro, Renoir and Vuillard, celebrate the same feminine elegance that characterized Lanvin’s fashions.

Among the standouts are Degas’s mysterious Femme au chapeau bleu, 1889 (est. €800,000–1.2 million; $1.1–1.6 million); a petite Neoclassical Picasso, La coiffure, 1922 (est. €1–1.5 million; $1.4–$2 million), said to depict the American patroness Sara Murphy; and Renoir’s La tapisserie dans le parc, Camille Monet, 1872–73, portraying Monet’s wife (est. €2.5–3.5 million, $3.4–4.7 million).

The collection, says Thomas Seydoux, European director of Impressionist and modern art for Christie’s, has emerged from “a time capsule to represent a great testimony of France at its very best.”

Taking place on December 16 is the bijoux sale Masterpieces from a Private French Collection, containing 10 lots of 18th-century furniture and objets d’art with exceptional provenances, estimated collectively at €10 million ($14 million).

The assemblage was put together by a discerning French couple with the help of one of France’s grandest antiquaires, the now-retired Maurice Segoura, whose high-profile clients included the Saudi collector Akram Ojjeh and the Rothschilds.

“Each piece is the best in its field,” says Adrien Meyer, the Christie’s Paris furniture department director, citing as evidence the Boulle marquetry—attributed to the master French cabinetmaker André Charles Boulle himself—on a pair of late Louis XIV ormolu-mounted tortoiseshell-and-brass inlaid ebony meuble d’appui with an estimated value of €2.5 million to €3.5 million ($3.5–4.3 million).

But the showstopper of the sale is a Louis XIV commode attributed to Bernard Ivan Risamburgh. The piece, which is making its auction debut, was created for the Grand Conseil president Louis-Charles de Machault and had remained in his family for three centuries (est. in excess of €4 million; $5.6 million). “I had its photo on the wall of my office in New York,” says Meyer, “and when I saw it in person, I fell to my knees." "Boudin et Boulle" originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's December 2008 Table of Contents.