Painting sells for US$3mil, making it the nation’s costliest art.

AN oil painting with the title

Portrait de Mademoiselle Phuong (pic) by Mai Trung Thu has sold at auction for the highest price ever paid for Vietnamese art.

Offered at the “Beyond Legends: Modern Art Evening Sale” auction by Sotheby’s Hong Kong, the painting was sold for a record amount.

With a guide price of US$500,000 (RM2mil), the painting eventually reached US$2.573mil (RM10.5mil) on Sunday.

After taxes and fees were calculated, the total came up to US$3.1mil (RM12.5mil).

This is more than double the previous highest valued auction sale where the painting Khoa Than (Nude) by Le Pho sold for US$1.4mil (RM5.7mil).

Mai Trung Thu was born in 1906 and died in 1980. He painted

Mademoiselle Phuong in 1930, when he was an art teacher at Lycee Francais de Hue, a French high school in Hue.

As one of the first artists to graduate from Ecole des Beaux-Art de l’Indochine (the Fine Arts College of Indochina) in Hanoi, he was one of the four most renowned Vietnamese artists based in France, together with Le Pho and Vu Cao Dam.

His reputation was tied to silk paintings on subjects of women and children, showcasing Asian culture in the early 20th century.

Mademoiselle Phuong, rendered in the oil medium, is exceptionally rare as Mai Trung Thu mostly devoted himself to painting on silk.

Poignantly, the portrait also captures the painter’s deep admiration of its sitter, a noble lady rumoured to be his love interest.