A self-portrait by French painter Edouard Manet has sold for a record price of more than £22 million during an auction on Tuesday night.

The self-portrait, painted between 1878 and 1879 was snapped up for £22,441,250 by an anonymous bidder at Sotheby's auction house in London.

The figure represents the highest price paid for a picture by the artist.

The previous highest price for a Manet was £16 million at an auction in New York in 1989.

It is one of only two self portraits by the artist and ranks among the greatest of the Impressionist movement, Sotheby's said.

The sombre-toned oil on canvas picture - Manet A La Palette - reveals the bowler-hatted artist poised with paint brush in hand.

Manet was viewed as the father of Impressionism a movement which in part, led to the creation of modern art.

The portrait was among a number of pictures that went under the hammer at the Impressionist and Modern Art Evening sale.

Two other pictures sold for more than £10 million.

Arbres a Collioure, a summer landscape by painter Andre Derain, sold for more than £16m, and Odalisques Jouant Aux Dames, an example of Henri Matisse's orientalist compositions, sold for almost £12 million.

The two French painters were seen as the fathers of the Fauvism movement.

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