The Picasso painting "Dora Maar au chat" (Dora Maar With Cat) had been given their highest ever pre-sale estimate of US$50 million but fetched $95.2 million at Sotheby’s in New York last Wednesday.

The painting was sold to an anonymous Russian buyer who sat in the last rows of the Sotheby’s room.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) painted this work in 1941 when the Nazis were occupying France.

The painting is a portrait of his lover, Dora Maar, whom he depicts sitting on a chair with a small, black cat on her shoulders.

Picasso met Dora Maar in a cafe called Cafe Les Deux Magots in Paris in 1936, when he was 55.

Dora Maar, 1907-1997, an artist and photographer, was born in France, of Croatian-French parents. She grew up in Argentina and spoke Spanish fluently. Her real name was Henriette Theodora Markovitch.

She made herself better known in the world for helping the completion of the other Picasso masterpiece "Guernica," which depicts an infamous scene from the Spanish Civil War. Dora Maar took photographs of the successive stages of the execution of that work.

"Dora Maar Au Chat" (50.5 by 37.5 inches) owned by the Gidwitz family of Chicago, was showed worldwide in Sotheby’s exhibitions through London, Hong Kong and then in New York for the auction.

The work is the world’s second highest amount ever paid for a painting after another Picasso work titled "Garcon a la piple" (Boy with a pipe), which sold for $104 million in May 2004.