Van Gogh at $180 Million and Cézanne at $120 Million: Sotheby’s to Auction Legendary Collection

This fall, Sotheby’s will offer a rare Vincent van Gogh painting at auction in New York that has not been seen publicly for nearly half a century. The auction house expects it to fetch around $180 million — potentially setting a new world auction record for the artist, CNN reports.

Following the Van Gogh, an equally rare painting by Paul Cézanne will go under the hammer at the November sale. It, too, has not been exhibited publicly for about 50 years and carries an estimate of “around” $120 million. Sotheby’s is hoping to set two records in a single evening.

Both paintings have belonged to the same family since the 1970s. Ten additional works from the collection will also be offered, including paintings by Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Sotheby’s has already dubbed the collection an “El Dorado” of private collections and expects it to generate $450 million or more in less than an hour.

“This is one of the greatest surviving private collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art,” said Helena Newman, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, who also described the collection as a “mini Musée d’Orsay.”

The collection belonged to Argentine businessman Carlos Pedro Blaquier and his wife, philanthropist Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier. For decades, it remained largely a mystery to the public: the couple rarely lent their paintings to museums, and the collection was kept in Argentina.

The works are now being sold by the couple’s children following Nelly’s death in 2020 and Carlos’s death in 2023.

The star lot is Van Gogh’s Châtaigniers-en-fleurs (Chestnut Trees in Bloom), painted during the final two months of the artist’s life in Auvers-sur-Oise.

Van Gogh had only recently left the psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he had voluntarily spent about a year. Sotheby’s highlights the particular energy and optimism of the works he created during this period.

“It’s an incredible, very expressive palette,” Newman said, noting that only a handful of works survive from the final months of the artist’s life.

The painting is now heading to Hong Kong, where it will be displayed ahead of the November auction.

Cézanne’s Harlequin is one of a series of four paintings depicting the character and is the only one that is not currently held by a museum.

Before entering the Blaquier family collection, the work was owned by renowned French art dealers Ambroise Vollard, Paul Durand-Ruel and Paul Rosenberg. It was also exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, London’s Tate and the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Blaquier family acquired the painting in 1975.

If both works set new records, it would mark the second time that Van Gogh and Cézanne works have become record-breaking lots on the same evening thanks to a single private collection. In 2022, at the sale of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s collection, a Van Gogh landscape sold for $117 million, while a Cézanne painting fetched $137.7 million.

The Blaquier-Arrieta sale is the latest major museum-quality collection to come to the art market. In recent years, collections belonging to Si Newhouse, Paul Allen, Pauline Karpidas and Leonard Lauder have also been offered at auction.

According to Newman, a generational shift is now taking place: collections assembled in the 1960s through the 1980s are gradually coming to market as their owners grow older and pass away.