This Mets masterpiece is a lot prettier than this year’s team so far.
The blue-blood New York family that helped launch the Amazin’s in 1962 is auctioning off nearly a dozen treasures from their famed art collection — including a $35 million Renoir they’ve owned for 97 years.
The 1877 oil painting La femme aux lilas or Portrait de Nini Lopez, is set to hit the auction block on May 18.
CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LTD. 2026
It’s one of nine masterpieces from the collection of the late Lorinda Payson de Roulet, the daughter of heiress and pioneering Mets founder Joan Whitney Payson.
De Roulet died in October 2025 at age 95. Her mom — known as the “Mother of the Mets” — became the first woman to own a major American sports franchise when she acquired 87% of the upstart Queens team in its inaugural season.
She helped to heal a city and baseball fan base that had seen the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants flee to California in 1958.
The family was known as much for its art acument as its love of baseball.
“This is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, American collecting family over the 20th century,” Max Carter, Christie’s global chairman of 20th- and 21st-century art, told The Post.
Payson and her husband, lawyer Charles S. Payson, purchased the Renoir in 1929 for $100,000 — the equivalent of $1.9 million today.
Payson’s granddaughter, the heiress Whitney Bullock, 74, remembered visiting Payson’s home on Long Island, and greeting the masterpiece in the living room.
“We’d say ‘Hi Renoir,’ just to check if it was ok,” Bullock told the Post in an exclusive interview, as she flipped through family photo albums.
She recalled her grandparents throwing lavish “themed costume parties.” One photo showed her grandfather dressed as Neptune, striding up a grand staircase — and passing Marc Chagall’s L’Acrobate, which is now on the block for an expected $700,000 to $1 million.
“I had no idea growing up that I was supposed to be impressed,” Bullock laughed. “I really loved the Chagall. It brought joy to everybody.”
The painters Payson hung on the walls of her Manhasset mansion were like a who’s who of art history: Vincent van Gogh, Francisco Goya, El Greco, Paul Gauguin, Winslow Homer, and of course, Pablo Picasso.
One Christmas, the Picasso — Au Lapin Agile — became the backdrop to the kids’ game of Nerf darts.
That’s when Bullock’s mother, de Roulet, decided to sell it. “We’re gonna do something different with this now,” she recalled her mom saying.
A year later, she sold the Picasso for $40.7 million and used the proceeds to launch The Patrina Foundation, which gives educational grants to women and girls.
Such charities “were the things mom most cared about,” Bullock said.
But the family legacy included diamonds — as in baseball diamonds.
Around 1915, Joan Whitney Payson began going with her mom, poet and philanthropist Helen Hay Whitney, to see the Giants play at the Polo Grounds. “The two of them being the only women there at the time,” Bullock said.
Payson later bought a 10% stake in the Giants, and even tried to stop owner Horace Stoneham from moving the team to San Francisco.
So Payson went bigger — and the New York Mets were born.
“We went all the time. The whole family had a whole bunch of rows,” Bullock raved of the old Shea Stadium. “I was around for a lot of ’69. I was there for the ‘black cat game.’ That’s when we knew, it’s gonna happen.”
She was referring to the famous scene on Sept. 9, 1969, when a black cat darted across the rival Chicago Cubs dugout at Shea, an omen many Mets fans believe foretold miracle World Series run.
Bullock later worked in Mets PR and endured fury from the fans after the infamous Midnight Massacre, when Tom Seaver was dealt to the Cincinnati Reds in June 1977.
“I was the one who had to take all those phone calls by the very unhappy Mets fans. People were screaming at me,” Bullock shuddered.
When the team was sold in 1986 to Nelson Doubleday Jr. and Fred Wilpon, both she and her mother, who had been running the day-to-day operations, were pushed out. She said current owner Steve Cohen has tried to restore the family’s legacy.
The Renoir and the other eight paintings up for auction will be on free public view at Christie’s Rockefeller Center galleries from May 9 to May 18.
“I hope that the paintings find happy homes,” Bullock said as she closed the photo albums.