The private-art ‘El Dorado’ goes to auction: Sotheby’s targets $450 million for the Blaquier-Arrieta collection, with a Van Gogh at $180 million and a Cézanne at $120 million

Sotheby’s will auction next November one of the most legendary private collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art — the 12 paintings of the Argentine Blaquier-Arrieta family, which have not been shown publicly for about half a century. The sale, scheduled for the evening of November 18 in New York, targets around $450 million, as CNN reports, and could break auction records for two giants of modern painting.

The collection’s masterpiece is Vincent van Gogh’s “Châtaignier en fleurs roses et blanches,” painted in May 1890, in the last two months of the artist’s life at Auvers-sur-Oise. Sotheby’s estimates the painting at about $180 million — far above the artist’s current record of $117 million — and the auction house’s chair for Impressionist and modern art, Helena Newman, told The Art Newspaper it could reach $200 million or more. The painting has not been exhibited publicly since 1964 at New York’s Guggenheim Museum and is among the few late works by Van Gogh still in private hands.

Just as rare is Paul Cézanne’s “Arlequin,” painted between 1888 and 1890, with an estimate of about $120 million. It is from a series of four “Harlequin” paintings, the only one not held in a museum, and passed through the hands of great French art dealers such as Ambroise Vollard, Paul Durand-Ruel and Paul Rosenberg before the Blaquier family bought it in 1975. “It is one of the greatest remaining private collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art — a ‘Musée d’Orsay’ in miniature,” Newman said.

The 12 paintings, collected by sugar industrialist Carlos Pedro Blaquier and his wife, art patron Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier, were presented together for the first time on Wednesday morning in London — where the family had bought most of them in the 1970s from the Lefevre Gallery. Five of the works will be shown at Sotheby’s in London starting today, while the rest go on tour to Taipei, Hong Kong and Paris before the November sale. The family, which put the paintings up for sale after Nelly’s death in 2020 and Carlos’s in 2023, had kept the collection closed off for decades — as former Sotheby’s director Philip Hook recalled, its mystery was “ongoing” throughout his whole career: “What was in it? How good was it? The thing was, nobody knew.”