"Empire of Light" by René Magritte will be auctioned for the first time at Sotheby's. The starting price for the painting is 60 million dollars.

The monumental painting, painted in 1961 for Baroness Anne-Marie Gillon Blood will be sold at auction at Sotheby's in London on March 2. The canvas measures 114 by 146 centimeters with an estimated value of more than 45 million pounds sterling ($60 million).

René Magritte's enigmatic painting Empire of Light is one of his most coveted and most famous, rivaled only by the surrealist motif of The Man in the Cauldron.

The painting has been exhibited many times in Brussels, Rome, Paris, Vienna, Milan, Seoul, Edinburgh and San Francisco, and was in the Magritte Museum in Brussels from 2009 to 2020. This cinematic composition was also the inspiration for a scene in The Exorcist, released in 1973. Helena Newman, chairman of Sotheby's European division and head of the international Impressionist and Modern art department, did not reveal the exact reason why the family has decided to sell the painting now. According to her, "The Magritte painting has been stored in Brussels for the past ten years and the family feels it is time to send it on its own journey.