Picasso sale sets record

A work by Pablo Picasso has set an auction record, with an early painting by the modern master selling for $104 million US on Wednesday at Sotheby's auction house.

The sale of the Boy with a Pipe included the auction price of $93 million plus Sotheby's commission of about $11 million.

The painting had a pre-sale estimate of $70 million. Sotheby officials called the work "one of the most beautiful of the artist's Rose Period paintings and one of the most important early works by Pablo Picasso ever to appear on the market."

Wednesday's sale to an unnamed buyer set a record for the highest price paid at auction for a painting.

In 1990, Christie's sold Vincent van Gogh's Portrait of Doctor Gachet to a Japanese billionaire for $82.5 million, a price that also included the auction house's premium.

Picasso's Boy with a Pipe depicts a young Parisian boy wearing a garland of flowers and holding a pipe in his left hand.

Picasso painted the work at age 24, soon after he had settled in Montmartre and about two years before he created his pivotal work Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which would mark his place in history as founder of the Cubist movement.

Newspaper mogul John Hay Whitney and his philanthropist wife Betsey bought Boy with a Pipe in 1950 for $30,000. The work was part of the Whitney family's collection of major works by artists such as Picasso, Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas.

Sotheby's gave a group of 34 paintings from the collection a total presale estimate of $140 million. The total came out to $190 million, proceeds of which will go to Betsey Whitney's Greentree Foundation, a charity she created after her husband's death in 1982. She died in 1998.