Mel Gibson and his soon-to-be-ex wife, Robyn, successfully added some liquidity to their portfolio at Christie’s American paintings sale yesterday when their 1922 Maxfield Parrish painting, Daybreak, sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for $5.2 million. The painting, the artist's most famous work, had been estimated to earn between $4 million and $7 million on the auction block.

Another Parrish painting owned by the Gibsons, Sing a Song of Sixpence (1910), was also hammered down for $2.2 million, slightly below its $2.5–3.5 million estimate. Still, that was good enough to rank as the third most expensive artwork sold in the day's auction. Andrew Wyeths 1967 Off Shore was the top lot of the day, leaping past its $1.2–1.8 million estimate to finish at $6.4 million.

In total, ten works by Parrish sold, including his 1912 Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, which made $1.3 million against a low estimate of $1.5 million, and the humorous Mr. Pickle, a simple 1911 pencil-on-paper drawing, which sold for $32,500 — more than four times its $7,000 high estimate.