Van Gogh's $180 M. 'Châtaigniers en fleurs' Leads Blaquier Sale

A Van Gogh landscape estimated at around $180 million will lead the sale of the Blaquier-Arrieta collection at Sotheby's New York on November 18. The twelve works, with a combined estimate in the region of $450 million, come from the private holdings of Carlos Pedro Blaquier and Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier.

For decades, the couple quietly lived with paintings of a kind that has largely vanished from private hands: major works by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Paul Gauguin, many of which have not been seen publicly in more than half a century. Now the whole group is coming to market at once.

At the top of the sale sit two lots with record-setting potential. Van Gogh's Châtaigniers en fleurs carries an estimate of roughly $180 million, while Cézanne's Arlequin is estimated at around $120 million. According to Sotheby's, both could surpass the artists' current auction records.

The Blaquiers assembled most of the collection in the 1970s, an era when paintings of this caliber could still be acquired from London dealers rather than through bidding wars at auction. Seven of the twelve works came through the Lefevre Gallery on Bruton Street, including the Cézanne, the Renoir, the Degas, and the Gauguin on offer, as well as a painting by Pissarro.

The group spans four decades of French painting, from an 1873 Sisley to two Fauvist canvases painted more than thirty years later. Its emergence marks a rare event for the Impressionist and Modern market: a single-owner collection of fresh-to-market museum-quality works, most of them unseen on public walls since the 1970s or earlier.

If Châtaigniers en fleurs or Arlequin performs at the top of its estimate, November 18 could reset the auction benchmarks for two of the market's most closely watched artists.