Amazin Masterpiece: Christies to auction off $35 million Renoir owned by NY Mets founding family

This Mets masterpiece is a lot prettier than this year’s team so far.The blue-blood New York family that helped launch the Amazin’s in 1962 is auctioning off nearly a dozen treasures from their famed art collection — including a $35 million Renoir they’ve owned for 97 years.The 1877 oil painting La femme aux lilas or Portrait de Nini Lopez, is set to hit the auction block on May 18. It’s one of nine masterpieces from the collection of the late Lorinda Payson de Roulet, the daughter of heiress and pioneering Mets founder Joan Whitney Payson.De Roulet died in October 2025 at age 95.Her mom — known as the “Mother of the Mets” — became the first woman to own a major American sports franchise when she acquired 87% of the upstart Queens team in its inaugural season.She helped to heal a city and baseball fan base that had seen the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants flee to California in 1958.The family was known as much for its art acument as its love of baseball.“This is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, American collecting family over the 20th century,” Max Carter, Christie’s global chairman of 20th- and 21st-century art, told The Post. Payson and her husband, lawyer Charles S.

Payson, purchased the Renoir in 1929 for $100,000 — the equivalent of $1.9 million today.Payson’s granddaughter, the heiress Whitney Bullock, 74, remembered visiting Payson’s home on Long Island, and greeting the masterpiece in the living room.  “We’d say ‘Hi Renoir,’ just to check if it was ok,” Bullock told the Post in an exclusive interview, as she flipped through family photo albums.She recalled her grandparents throwing lavish “themed costume parties.” One photo showed her grandfather dressed as Neptune, striding up a grand staircase — and passing Marc Chagall’s L’Acrobate, which is now on the block for an expected $700,000 to $1 million.“I had no idea growing up that I was supposed to be impressed,” Bullock laughed.

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