Wynn buys $23.5 million Renoir

Wednesday, May 7, 2003 | 9:44 a.m.

NEW YORK -- An 1882 Renoir portrait of a French gentleman's wife sitting in her garden, deemed too daring by the husband who commissioned it because of its bright colors, is heading for Las Vegas.

Steve Wynn, the casino owner and art collector, bought the painting, "In the Roses (Madame Leon Clapisson)," for $23.5 million Tuesday night at Sotheby's sale of Impressionist and modern art. It was the most expensive painting in the sale, bringing just over its $20 million low estimate, and is to go on view at his gallery in the lobby of the old Desert Inn on the Las Vegas Strip until Wynn opens his adjacent new casino resort, Le Reve.

At Sotheby's viewing over the weekend, art dealers speculated on what the painting would have fetched in the heady days of the 1980s, when the Japanese snapped up pretty Impressionist paintings like this one for perhaps three times what it brought Tuesday night.

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