Manet self-portrait fetches record £22m at Sotheby's auction

Self-portrait With a Palette, put up for sale by hedge fund tycoon Steve Cohen, sets new benchmark for the artist

Edouard Manet's Self-portrait With a Palette has been owned by such renowned collectors as Auguste Pellerin and Jakob Goldschmidt. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

An important Édouard Manet self-portrait – one of only two that the artist ever painted – set an auction record last night when it sold in London for £22.4m.

The artist's depiction of himself as a dandyish gentleman, complete with palette in right hand and brush in left hand, broke the previous record for a Manet of £16.3m, set in 1989.

It was a brisk evening at Sotheby's, with bidders buying £112m of impressionist and modern art. But it was not a blockbuster night – that could come tonight at Christie's, with its two star lots of a blue period Picasso and a Monet waterlily painting.

Self-portrait With a Palette, painted by Manet in 1878, had been estimated at between £20 and £30m, and the fact that it achieved the lower end of the estimate could even be seen as a disappointment, given some of the extraordinary prices paid for top-end art this year. The auction record for any work of art has been broken twice already in 2010 – £65m for Giacometti's Walking Man I sculpture in February and then£70m for a Picasso in May.

The Manet was put up for sale by one of the world's richest hedge fund tycoons, Steve Cohen, who bought it when he first started collecting art 10 years ago.

Over the years, the painting has been owned by some of the world's best known collectors, beginning with the French industrialist Auguste Pellerin. It was also Lot No 1 of one of the most famous sales of the last century – the October 1958 sale at Sotheby's of work from the collection of Jakob Goldschmidt. Predictably, the newspapers at the time called it the "sale of the century", and among those wearing dinner jackets and posh frocks in the audience were Kirk Douglas, Somerset Maugham and Margot Fonteyn. It sold for the then eye-popping sum of £65,000 to the Wall Street investor John Loeb.

Other standouts from last night's sale included a new artist record for André Derain, for his fabulously vibrant Arbres à Collioure, which sold for £16.3m – double the previous record and also the most money ever spent on any fauvist painting at auction.

Its sale was all the more interesting because, for 40 years, it was hidden in a Paris bank vault. Helena Newman, a Sotheby's vice-chairman, said after the sale: "The strong, fauve colours and powerful composition of the Derain painting, combined with its extraordinary provenance, proved extremely appealing to tonight's bidders."

It was also a strong night for drawings. For example, Henri Matisse's Étude pour Nu rose sold for £5.9m, a record for a drawing by the artist.

All eyes now turn to Christie's this evening. Its president, Jussi Pylkkänen, has talked of the existence of a 21st-century version of the Medicis – super-rich collectors from the UK and US, the Middle East, Russia and China – all competing for the very best examples of art.

The question is will they be tempted and could the auction record be broken once again when Monet's Nymphéas, 1906 and Picasso's Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto, being sold for charity in aid of Andrew Lloyd Webber's foundation, are offered for auction. Both have estimates of £30 to £40m.