Edward Hopper’s “Monhegan Lighthouse” sold at auction Wednesday for $4.1 million, more than twice its estimated value.

The buyer’s identity was not immediately available Wednesday morning after the sale. The final bid was $3,300,000 but the buyer’s premium, the amount that goes to the auction house, increased the final price to $4,146,000. The auction Wednesday was run by New York-based Sotheby’s and also included works by Rene Magritte, Salvador Dali, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Hopper painted the scene during visits to Monhegan Island between 1916 and 1919. After Hopper’s death in 1967, the small oil painting, 9 by 12 inches, changed hands a few times. It had been in the same collector’s family since 1974, before being sold Wednesday.

The painting shows the lighthouse and adjacent buildings that are now part of the Monhegan Museum of Art and History. The Monhegan Museum’s permanent exhibits are housed in the former lighthouse keeper’s house shown in the painting. The Hopper painting actually inspired museum officials to build a replica of the assistant keeper’s house — shown in the painting but torn down in the 1920s — to house exhibitions.

Though Hopper didn’t have a permanent summer home in Maine, like so many notable 20th century artists, he came to the state often and painted what he saw. In May 2025, Sotheby’s sold another of Hopper’s paintings, his 1927 watercolor “Spurwink Church,” for just over $1 million to an unidentified buyer from Europe. It shows a modest church building on Route 77 in Cape Elizabeth, which still stands.

Hopper’s 1929 painting “The Lighthouse at Two Lights,” another Cape Elizabeth structure, is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Over the years, “Monhegan Lighthouse” has been exhibited at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland and several other museums and galleries.

The painting’s value had been estimated at between $1.2 and $1.8 million, said Stefany Sekara Morris, senior vice president and head of American art at Sotheby’s. That estimate was based on what other high-profile paintings by Hopper sold for recently, and the fact that Hopper’s coastal and lighthouse paintings are extremely popular and don’t often come up for sale, Morris said.

Hopper was born in the New York City suburb of Nyack. His best-known painting might be “Nighthawks” (1942), a lonely scene of people sitting at a dimly lit diner counter at night. He first came to Monhegan to paint at the urging of his teacher, Robert Henri, who discovered the Midcoast Maine island around the turn of the 20th century and encouraged artists like Rockwell Kent, George Bellows and Hopper to paint there. 

The island has continued to attract artists and art lovers. The museum’s upcoming exhibition, “To Monhegan, With Love: The Susan Bateson and Stephen S. Fuller Collection,” includes 89 paintings either created on or inspired by Monhegan. Opening July 1, it will include works by Bellows, Henri, Kent, James Fitzgerald, Edward Redfield and others.