Sotheby’s has unveiled the Blaquier-Arrieta Collection ahead of a November sale in New York. The sheer scale of what is going under the hammer is difficult to assess. Twelve paintings, each a masterpiece, nearly all of them unseen by the public for decades, with a combined estimate of around $450 million. It is rare to see a collection of this calibre surface intact.
Leading the group is Vincent van Gogh’s Châtaigniers en fleurs, estimated at $180 million, painted within days of the artist’s arrival in Auvers-sur-Oise in May 1890, the village where he would spend the final two months of his life. Having just been released from the asylum at Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh arrived in Auvers with an unexpected surge of optimism, writing of lush greenery and a desire to work that would, in his own words, devour him. What followed was arguably the most urgent, emotionally charged stretch of his entire career, and this painting belongs to its earliest, most hopeful days. A blossoming chestnut tree dominates the canvas, rendered with the same gestural intensity that defines The Starry Night and Wheatfield with Crows, both of which were painted in the weeks that followed. Of the landscapes Van Gogh completed during this period, only eight remain in private hands, and none still in private ownership rivals this one in scale or ambition. Its provenance runs through Theo van Gogh, then Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, before passing through the publisher Samuel Fischer, songwriter and Capitol Records co-founder Buddy DeSylva, and New York collector Harriet Harris-Jonas, whose apartment once hosted private tours arranged by the Metropolitan Museum. The Blaquiers acquired it from Wildenstein in 1975, and it has not been shown publicly since.
Paul Cézanne’s Arlequin, estimated at $120 million
Running close behind is Paul Cézanne’s Arlequin, estimated at $120 million, one of only four paintings in his celebrated Harlequin series and the only one remaining outside a museum collection. Painted between 1888 and 1890 using his teenage son Paul as model, the series marks the first time Cézanne made a major painting of his only child, and art historian Felix Baumann has called the two related series from this period among the most enigmatic groups in Cézanne’s entire output. Arlequin passed through an extraordinary run of dealers and collectors, Ambroise Vollard, Durand-Ruel, Paul Rosenberg, before hanging for two decades at the Rothschild family’s Merton Hall in Cambridge and eventually reaching the Blaquiers through London’s Lefevre Gallery in the 1970s. It has not been publicly exhibited since 1975, though it appeared earlier at the 1907 Salon d’Automne and MoMA’s 1929 Cézanne show. When a smaller related Harlequin sold at Sotheby’s in 1988, it brought $8.2 million, then the second highest price ever recorded for the artist at auction. Given that benchmark and the far greater scale and significance of this canvas, a new record for Cézanne seems almost inevitable.
Ten further paintings round out the collection, each representing a genuine career highlight for its maker. Renoir’s En Canot, painted in 1877, the same year the Impressionists formally adopted that name, depicts Marguerite Legrand, one of his favoured models, and carries an estimate of $25-35 million. Camille Pissarro’s La Place du Théâtre-Français et l’avenue de l’Opéra, painted from a hotel window overlooking Haussmann’s redesigned boulevards, is estimated at $30-40 million and has not been seen publicly since 1958. Edgar Degas’s pastel Avant la course, capturing the tense stillness before a horse race, carries an estimate of $20 to 30 million and has been out of public view since 1968.
Monet contributes Le Jardin des Tuileries, one of only two surviving privately held works from a series of four views painted in 1876 from an apartment lent to him by the collector Victor Chocquet, estimated at $15 to 20 million. Gauguin’s late Tahitian still life, Fleurs dans une coupe, painted from what the artist himself called his “crazy imagination,” carries an estimate of $10 to $ 15 million. In contrast, André Derain’s Bateaux au port de Collioure, a vivid work from his pivotal 1905 summer with Matisse, is estimated at $8 to 12 million. Rounding out the group are a Vlaminck still life showing his early engagement with Cézanne, an Alfred Sisley riverscape, a second Pissarro, and a Toulouse-Lautrec portrait.
Simon Shaw, Sotheby’s senior advisor for Impressionist and Modern Art, described the collection as feeling less like a private holding and more like a miniature Musée d’Orsay, opening its doors for the very first time. Helena Newman, the house’s European chairman, called the London unveiling particularly fitting, noting that most of the works were originally acquired there in the 1970s, several straight from the Lefevre Gallery on Bruton Street.
Claude Monet Le Jardin des Tuileries 1876 estimated at $15m to $20m
The collection belonged to Carlos Pedro Blaquier and Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier, prominent figures in Argentine cultural life. Nelly, in particular, played a defining role in shaping the holdings, serving on the boards of institutions including MoMA’s International Council and the Friends of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, while also supporting education and medical research initiatives back home in Buenos Aires.
Sotheby’s vice chairman Julian Dawes called the pairing of the Van Gogh and Cézanne alone a career highlight for any specialist, noting that both paintings have existed, for an entire generation of scholars, only as reproductions in catalogues raisonnés. Offering either one at auction would be remarkable. Offering both, alongside ten further works of comparable rarity, is the kind of sale that comes along perhaps once in a career, if that.
Top Photo: Vincent van Gogh’s Châtaigniers en fleurs, estimated at $180 million. All Photos Courtesy Sotheby’s