"The Pond-Moonlight" Sold for $3M
According to the Sotheby's catalog, Stieglitz's gallery sold the Edward Steichen print, "The Pond-Moonlight" for $75 in 1906, the equivalent of about $1,500 today. This week, Sotheby's announced that "the Pond-Moonlight" a platinum print by Edward Steichen owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had sold for almost $3 million to an anonymous buyer.
Photography experts pointed out that several complex factors went into generating this sale. The rarity of the Steichen print: only two others are known to exist,one at the Museum of Modern Ar and the other at the Met. Last year, when the Met acquired the Gilman Paper Company collection, considered the most important private photography collection in the world, it contained another print of the photograph. That is the print that sold this week.