Monet painting sells for $41.5m

A WORK from Claude Monet's Water Lilies series has been sold for more than $US43 million ($41.50 million) at a New York City auction.

The 1905 work is considered among the best of a feverish series of Monet paintings depicting his garden's lily pond in Giverny, France.

The painting is from the estate of Ethel Strong Allen, widow of Wall Street executive Herbert Allen Sr. She bequeathed the Monet to a suburban boarding school, along with two Impressionist landscapes by Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley.

Christie's auction house says the three works  raised a total of nearly $US51 million school.