The $450 million Blaquier-Arrieta collection at Sotheby’s: Van Gogh and Cézanne poised to break auction records

At the big November sale in New York, Sotheby’s will auction a rare painting by Vincent van Gogh, unseen for five decades, for which it expects to fetch around $180 million — which would set a new auction record for the artist, as CNN reports. The current records are held by the historic 2022 sale of Paul Allen’s collection at Christie’s, when Van Gogh’s “Verger avec cyprès” sold for $117 million.

The painting “Châtaigniers en fleurs” (Chestnut Trees in Blossom) was created in the last two months of Van Gogh’s life, in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, shortly after he had left the psychiatric clinic at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he had stayed voluntarily for a year. Sotheby’s notes the vigour and optimism of this period, from which only a few works have survived — some of them at the Musée d’Orsay, including the portrait of Dr. Paul Gachet.

The collection’s other star lot, Paul Cézanne’s “Arlequin”, was presented on Wednesday morning at the Sotheby’s gallery in London. It is one of four paintings in the Arlequin series and the only one not held in a museum; the auction house estimates it at “around” $120 million. The work passed through the hands of the legendary dealers Ambroise Vollard, Paul Durand-Ruel and Paul Rosenberg and was exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, at Tate in London and at the Art Institute of Chicago, before being sold to the Blaquier family in 1975.

The collection belonged to the late Argentine businessman Carlos Pedro Blaquier and his wife, the art lover Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier; their children are selling the lots after her death in 2020 and his in 2023. According to Helena Newman, chair of Sotheby’s Europe, it is “one of the largest remaining collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art in private hands”, a “Musée d’Orsay in miniature”. Around the collection, which according to CNN also includes works by Monet and Renoir, there had for decades been a “legendary and mythical” status, as the family never lent the paintings to museums. According to CNN, in the last decade of his life Blaquier was investigated for crimes against humanity during Argentina’s brutal 1976–83 dictatorship — charges he denied and for which he was never convicted, according to Sotheby’s.

If both star works set records, it will be the second time that Van Gogh’s and Cézanne’s records are broken on the same night, within the same collection: at the 2022 sale, “Verger avec cyprès” reached $117 million, while Cézanne’s “La Montagne Sainte-Victoire” sold for $137.7 million.