Sotheby's £95m art sale bonanza

Sotheby's sale of Impressionist and early 20th-century art in New Bond Street made £95 million - the largest sum ever to change hands at an auction in Europe.

Prices achieved last night smashed individual records for six artists - and 30 paintings went under the hammer for more than £1million each.

The sale kicked off a week of frenzied auctions which is set to see £400million of art sold to Russian, Asian and American collectors.

Demand was so great that an extra room had to be opened to accommodate the estimated 700 observers.

The honour of most expensive lot fell to Russian painter Chaim Soutine's L'Homme Au Foulard Rouge.

With an estimate of £5 million, Soutine's 1921 portrait of a redscarfed man became the subject of bidding among patriotic Russian oligarchs before being sold to a mystery buyer for £8.76 million - creating a record for the artist.

The sale netted a tidy profit for American Dorothy Cherry, widow of health insurance tycoon Wendell Cherry, who had bought the painting for £1.5 million a decade ago.

Auguste Renoir's Les Deux Soeurs, from the collection of late Revlon founder Charles Lachman, had been tipped to be top lot. But the 1889 masterpiece failed to reach its high estimate of £8 million - instead fetching £6.85 million.

Likewise Edgar Degas's Trois Danseuses Jupes Violettes (1896) sold for £4.16 million - above its low estimate but less than the £ 6million some were predicting.

However, artist records were set for French Impressionist Alfred Sisley, whose 1891 landscape Le Loing ¿ Moret, En ...té sold for £2.93million (estimate: £2.5 million) and Raoul Dufy, whose 1907 painting La Foire Aux Oignons sold for more than £4million, half a million more than its high estimate.

Other painters who exceeded their estimates included Claude Monet, whose 1884 masterpiece Maison Du Jardinier sold for over £4 million (£500,000 above its high estimate); Wassily Kandinsky, whose 1909 painting Weilheim-Marienplatz fetched £2.48 million (its high estimate was £2 million); and Belgian surrealist René Magritte, who had four paintings sell for more than their estimates.

Melanie Clore, co-chairman of Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern Art Department, said: "This was an extraordinary evening. What was most encouraging about tonight's sale was that the evening's success was not pegged on a single picture but, led by the Soutine, the strength of the market was evident throughout."