How Much Is Place de la Concorde Worth?

Place de la Concorde is among Degas’s most discussed non‑ballet works, a signature statement of his modern vision in the mid‑1870s. Its radical cropping, off‑center figures (Viscount Lepic and his daughters), and urban subject encapsulate the artist’s photographic/Japonisme-inflected compositional breakthroughs that influenced modern art. The painting is widely reproduced in scholarship and teaching, and its high visibility was amplified by its postwar rediscovery and exhibition. Within Degas’s oeuvre, it represents a top tier of ambition and finish—fewer still are comparably scaled, finished oils of urban life from this prime moment. That centrality commands a substantial premium over even highly admired dancer or bather compositions.

Large, finished 1870s oils by Degas of modern Parisian life are exceptionally scarce in private hands; many of the most important examples sit in museums. While the market for Degas is deep, it is built around works on paper and bronzes. A canonical, large‑scale modern-life oil with extensive literature and exhibition history has virtually no direct substitutes. That scarcity dynamic supports a nine‑figure valuation because trophy‑level buyers must compete across a vanishingly small pool of comparables. By contrast, secondary oils and pastels transact in the single-digit millions; the market gap highlights how singular works like Place de la Concorde clear past artist records when available.

Degas’s auction apex is $41.61m for a Little Dancer bronze (2022), and $37.04m for a 2D work (2008). These establish a baseline ceiling for the artist; a top-tier, earlier, larger, and compositionally seminal oil reasonably commands a significant premium. Peer benchmarks—iconic 1870s–1880s Paris modern-life works by Manet, Pissarro, and Caillebotte—have achieved circa $30–65m at auction, placing the category’s trophy bandwidth squarely in the high eight to low nine figures. Using these anchors, the $70–120m range for Place de la Concorde is a measured extrapolation that reflects both artist-specific demand and cross-artist competition for museum-grade 19th‑century modern masterpieces.

The painting is held by the State Hermitage Museum and, under Russian state museum practice and law, is effectively non‑marketable. It was part of the post‑war “trophy art” corpus publicly acknowledged and exhibited in the mid‑1990s, a status that adds legal and diplomatic complexity. These realities matter for any real‑world transaction, potentially reducing a cash‑market price if a sale were attempted. For insurance and comparative valuation, however, the relevant metric is replacement value for a work of equivalent quality and renown—hence the strong theoretical figure. Any concrete pricing would also hinge on condition disclosures, immunity-from-seizure protections, and provenance/resolution posture.