Renoir works fetch £800,000 - Telegraph In an open letter to French Culture Minister Aurelie Filippetti, the Orsay Museum in Paris and the Renoir Museum in the southeastern French city of Cagnes-sur-Mer, he expressed his desire for the two institutions to buy some of the items. The sale generated "huge" interest, according to Brian Roughton, managing director of fine arts for Heritage Auctions. The items were purchased from Paul Renoir by Rima Fine Arts gallery, in the southwestern state of Arizona. Jacques Renoir's anger did not go very far with Roughton, who said the artist's possessions unquestionably belonged to Paul Renoir and his wife. They first consigned it as one lot - they wanted to sell the whole thing. Most of the letters - some of the most controversial of the items up for sale, including ones written to the artist's wife, Aline, about his art - sold for well above their pre-sale estimates. The priciest to his wife ended up going for $12,500, while the highest bid for a letter to his son, fellow painter Jean Renoir, was $7,000. Also part of the sale was the painting "Les Becasses" (The Woodcocks) completed only a few hours before the artist's death at age 78 on December 3, 1919. It sold for $125,000, just over its estimated value of $80,000 to $120,000. But a number of sculptural plaster maquettes - created during Renoir's final years with the help of a young assistant Richard Guino, at the painter's home in Cagnes-sur-Mer - did not sell and several others went for well under their estimates. And one of the items anticipated to fetch the most money, the "Grande Venus Victorieuse," a large, 1.8-meter (5-foot-11-inch) sculpture, sold for $545,000, just around half the estimated value of $900,000 to $1 million.