Works by British sculptor Henry Moore and Spanish painter Joan Miro sold for record prices at a Christie’s sale.

The record-breaking Miró sale went under the hammer for £16.8m

The Moore sculpture, an abstract bronze cast of a reclining woman called Reclining Figure: Festival, sold for £19 million (€23 million) – more than three times the £5.5 million estimate.

Christie’s said the work, which was commissioned for the Festival of Britain in 1951, was “one of the most outstanding examples of the reclining figure in the whole of (Moore’s) prodigious oeuvre”.

The highest price previously set for a Moore work was just £4.3 million, for a 1957 bronze cast called Draped Reclining Woman, sold in London four years ago, a Christie’s spokesman said.

The record-breaking Miró sale, a 1925 canvas named Painting Poem (le corps de ma brune)” went under the hammer for £16.8 million – again soaring over the pre-sale estimate of up to £9 million.

“Le corps de ma brune is the finest work from a groundbreaking series of paintings,” said Olivier Camu, deputy chairman in Impressionist Art Department at Christie’s.

“Widely considered the most important of all of Miro’s work, the Poem Paintings instigated a whole new way of working that Miro would follow for the rest of his life and was to significantly influence Pablo Picasso.”

The painting, described by Christie’s as “part lyrical free-form painting and part hand-written stream-of-conscious poetry”, was sold from a private New York art collection.

The previous record auction price for a work by Miró, who died in 1983, was for La caresse des etoiles, which sold in New York in 2008 for $17 million.