Visitors to the Musée Magritte in Brussels will be familiar with this painting, which is set to go up for auction at Sotheby's in London on May 2nd and comes with an expectation of a whopping £45m guarantee.

That would be a remarkable new record for a painting by the surrealist René Magritte.

So far, the faceless portrait "Le Principe du plaisir" from 1937, which was sold at Sotheby's in New York in 2018 for 23.5 million dollars - at the time estimated at 15 to 20 million - is his most expensive painting ever sold at auction.

Ursula Scheer

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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“L'empire des lumières” is now being launched, one of 27 versions of a subject that René Magritte kept coming back to. From 2009 onwards, the 1961 version, which was on sale for the first time, was on permanent loan to the Magritte Museum. The artist depicted a two-storey town house, as might be found in the Belgian capital. But if he hadn't been himself, he wouldn't have given the depiction the quality of a paradoxical dream image: the sky is light blue and interspersed with white clouds over the property, which itself lies in the dead of night. The darkness is only cleared by the glow of a street lamp placed centrally in front of the building and light that penetrates from the upper floor - but it is half shaded by the silhouette-like blackness of a tree. Not a soul can be guessednot a breath of wind, not a bird in the branches: an unreal stillness dominates the view.

Peggy Guggenheim also loved the subject

From 1939 until the 1960s, the series "Reich der Lichter" - the common German title - was so popular in the form of gouache and oil paintings that Magritte was able to meet the competing demand from collectors on the 1954 Venice Biennale by immediately supplying several new versions of the picture exhibited there – which Peggy Guggenheim had secured for her collection.

Magritte painted the version now up for auction for Baroness Anne-Marie Gillion Crowet: his muse and a major figure in the Belgian cultural scene for decades. The painter met the daughter of his patron Pierre Crowet when she was sixteen. Back then, in 1956, she sat for him as a model for "La fée ignorante" - and saw one of his other paintings on the artist's wall, "Belle idée" from 1950, in which a woman's face appears in the head of a horse. The eyes, the hair: Anne-Marie recognized herself, and Magritte, as she has since happily said in interviews, smiled mockingly and said: "You see, I painted you before I met you." Actually found he embodies in her an aesthetic ideal to which he had previously worshiped. They had become inseparable.The artist immortalized her in pictures, painted works such as “La poitrine” and “La voix du sang” for her and the largest version of “The Kingdom of Lights” at 114.5 by 146 centimetres.

Since then, it has been in the family of Anne-Marie Gillion Crowet, a collector who, together with her husband Roland Gillion, has devoted herself primarily to Art Nouveau.

In 2013, the couple donated a remarkable collection of works to the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels for their fin-de-siècle museum.

“L'empire des lumières” from her collection is now on a tour of the auction house's branches in Los Angeles, New York, Hong Kong and finally London.

A few years ago, Le Figaro reported that the Gillion Crowet couple only had copies of Magritte paintings hanging on their walls.

Kind of surreal too.