For more than half a century, one of the most significant private collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art in existence has remained almost entirely hidden from public view. No museum loans, no auction appearances, no fanfare. The Blaquier-Arrieta Collection, assembled with quiet determination and extraordinary discernment by Argentine collectors Carlos Pedro Blaquier and Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier, has existed largely as a rumour, whispered about in gallery corridors and catalogued in academic footnotes, but never truly seen. That is all about to change.
On 18th November 2026, Sotheby’s New York will offer twelve works from this extraordinary collection in a single evening sale titled Legendary: The Blaquier-Arrieta Collection, with a combined estimate in the region of $450 million. It is, by any measure, one of the most consequential auction events in recent art market history.
A Collection Born Of A Golden Moment
To understand why this sale carries such weight, one must appreciate the era in which the collection was formed. During the 1970s, London’s Mayfair galleries still offered works of genuine museum calibre to discerning private buyers. The Blaquiers visited the city almost annually, and from the legendary Lefevre Gallery on Bruton Street alone, they acquired no fewer than seven of the twelve works now coming to auction, among them a Paul Cézanne, a Pierre-Auguste Renoir, a Camille Pissarro, an Edgar Degas, and a Paul Gauguin.
That world no longer exists. As Simon Shaw, Senior Advisor for Impressionist and Modern Art at Sotheby’s, observes: “There was a time when you could walk into a top gallery in London or New York and, over a few years, build something of real museum quality. You simply can’t do that now, at any price. What strikes me most is that the Blaquier-Arrieta collection doesn’t feel like a private collection at all. It feels like a small museum , a miniature Musée d’Orsay, now opening its doors for the very first time.”
The collection is, in this sense, a time capsule: a remarkably intact record of what was possible for a collector of serious means and serious intent during one of the last great windows of opportunity in the modern art market. Helena Newman, Sotheby’s Chairman for Europe and Chairman of Impressionist and Modern Art Worldwide, puts it plainly: “There is something magical about unveiling highlights of the Blaquier-Arrieta collection here in London, where so much of it was originally acquired. To see these paintings here is to step back into the 1970s, when the walls of dealers like Lefevre were replete with treasures of a calibre now only rarely to be found. The collection is a time capsule of that golden moment, and it is our great privilege to now open it up to the world.”
Van Gogh’s Final Flowering: Châtaigniers En Fleurs
The sale’s headline lot is a painting that, for many specialists, sits at the pinnacle of Van Gogh’s entire output. Châtaigniers en fleurs, Chestnut Trees in Blossom, was executed in Auvers-sur-Oise in late May 1890, just days after the artist’s arrival in the village where he would spend the last two months of his life. It carries an estimate in the region of $180 million and has not been seen in public for more than sixty years.
The context of its creation adds immeasurable resonance to the work. Van Gogh had spent the preceding year confined to the psychiatric asylum of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. His arrival in Auvers brought a wave of renewed optimism. He wrote of the “beautiful greenery in abundance” and his conviction that “the desire to work will devour me and make me insensible to everything else and in a good mood.” What followed was one of the most concentrated and emotionally charged periods of creativity in art history, producing works that now hang in the world’s greatest institutions: The Starry Night, Portrait of Dr. Gachet, The Church at Auvers-sur-Oise, Wheatfield with Crows. Sotheby’s has previous form in handling works of this magnitude — the Turner’s Rome From Mount Aventine Sotheby’s auction demonstrated the house’s expertise with rare, long-unseen masterpieces of comparable cultural weight.
Châtaigniers en fleurs belongs to the very first, and most hopeful, wave of this output. A massive, blossoming chestnut tree dominates the composition, its flowering canopy rendered with the richly worked, gestural impasto that places this canvas in direct visual dialogue with Van Gogh’s most celebrated works. Below the tree, a solitary figure, resembling the artist himself, walks past a trio of women in what appears to be Japanese costume, carrying parasols, lending the scene an air of quiet, dreamlike symbolism.
Of the paintings Van Gogh produced during his weeks in Auvers, only eight landscapes remain in private hands. In the past forty years, just ten works from this period have appeared at auction, and of those, only half were landscapes. None, Sotheby’s contends, has rivalled this painting in scale, quality, or emotional impact.
The work’s provenance is as distinguished as the painting itself. Following Van Gogh’s death in July 1890, it passed first to his brother Theo, then to Theo’s widow Johanna van Gogh-Bonger and their son Vincent Willem. Subsequent owners included Samuel Fischer, the visionary publisher whose S. Fischer Verlag first brought Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and Arthur Schnitzler to the world, and George “Buddy” Gard de Sylva, American songwriter, film producer, and co-founder of Capitol Records. In 1953, it was acquired by Harriet Harris-Jonas, whose collection was so celebrated that the Metropolitan Museum of Art arranged private tours for patrons to view it in her Fifth Avenue apartment. The Blaquiers purchased the work from Wildenstein in 1975. It has not been publicly exhibited since.
Julian Dawes, Sotheby’s Vice Chairman and Head of Impressionist and Modern Art for the Americas, puts the significance of the moment bluntly: “These are two of the finest works either artist made, painted within a few years of each other, and unseen for half a century. For a generation that has known these paintings only through the pages of catalogues raisonnés, they have become almost mythical. To offer either one would be a career highlight. To offer both, in a single sale, is something truly extraordinary.”
Cézanne’s Harlequin: The Last Of Its Kind In Private Hands
The second work Dawes refers to is Paul Cézanne’s Arlequin, estimated in the region of $120 million and widely regarded as one of the most important Cézannes ever to come to the market. Like the Van Gogh, it has not been seen in public since 1975.
Between 1888 and 1890, Cézanne painted four Harlequin compositions, works in which his son Paul posed for the first time for a major painting. They form part of a broader group of fifteen large-scale figure paintings, executed between 1888 and 1896 and encompassing the Boy in the Red Vest series alongside the celebrated Card Players and Smoker compositions. Together, art historians regard these as the apex of Cézanne’s figurative achievement. Of those fifteen works, virtually every example resides in a major museum. The exception, until now, has been Arlequin.
Art historian Felix Baumann has written that “between 1888 and 1890, Cézanne created two series of works that are among the most magnificent as well as the most enigmatic in his entire oeuvre. The first consists of images of the artist’s son Paul as Harlequin… the second group shows the young professional model Michelangelo di Rosa, known to art history as ‘Boy in the Red Vest’. In both of these series Cézanne, now fifty years old, explored the theme of maturing youth. In 1888 his son Paul was seventeen years old; the intimate relationship between the painter and his only child is documented in a number of portrait studies, yet never before had he produced a major painting of his son.”
The painting’s past is no less remarkable than its subject. Its provenance reads as a roll call of the modern art world’s most significant figures: Ambroise Vollard; Durand-Ruel; Paul Rosenberg; Wildenstein; and for some two decades from 1936 onwards, the walls of Merton Hall in Cambridge, the Rothschild family home. It subsequently entered the Lefevre Gallery before being purchased by the Blaquiers. Despite its decades in private hands, it was previously shown at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1907, the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1929, the Art Institute of Chicago in 1952, and Tate in London in 1954, appearing in some of the most significant Cézanne exhibitions ever staged.
Only one other Harlequin from this series has ever appeared at auction: a smaller example, now in the Pola Museum of Art in Kanagawa, which realised $8.2 million at Sotheby’s London in 1988, then the second highest price ever achieved for the artist. The comparison with The Card Players, reportedly acquired by the Qatari national collection in 2011 for $250 million, makes clear the rarefied territory this work occupies.
The Wider Collection: A Survey Of Impressionism’s Greatest Achievements
Beyond these two landmark works, the sale presents ten further paintings that trace the full arc of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism with remarkable cohesion and depth. Each represents a significant moment in its maker’s career. None has previously appeared at auction.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s En Canot (Jeune fille à la barque), estimated at $25–35 million, was painted in 1877, the very year the Impressionists formally adopted their name at the Third Impressionist Exhibition. A sun-drenched boating scene of nearly a metre in width, it is the largest 1870s work by Renoir to come to market in over two decades. The sitter is believed to be Marguerite “Margot” Legrand, one of the artist’s favoured models, who also appears in Bal du moulin de la Galette at the Musée d’Orsay.
Camille Pissarro’s grand Parisian streetscape La Place du Théâtre-Français et l’avenue de l’Opéra, soleil d’après-midi en hiver, estimated at $30–40 million, has been unseen since 1958. Painted in 1898 from the elevated vantage point of his window at the Grand Hôtel du Louvre, it ranks among the finest examples of his celebrated late Paris series to remain in private hands. Its provenance includes the collections of Leigh B. and Mary Lasker Block, and the renowned collector and museum founder Norton Simon.
Edgar Degas’s pastel Avant la course, estimated at $20–30 million, is one of the largest fully worked horseracing pastels by the artist remaining in private ownership and the most significant such work to come to market in at least four decades. It was acquired as early as 1895 by Harris Whittemore, one of the first American collectors of Impressionist art, before entering the collection of Sidney F. and Frances Lasker Brody, driving forces behind the founding of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Paul Gauguin’s Fleurs dans une coupe, estimated at $10–15 million, belongs to a small group of still lifes painted during the artist’s final years in Tahiti, entirely, as Gauguin himself described, from his “crazy imagination.” The composition fuses the human and the natural in a way that places it in direct conversation with Cézanne, an artist Gauguin revered profoundly.
Claude Monet’s Le Jardin des Tuileries, estimated at $15–20 million, was painted in 1876 from a fifth-floor apartment on the Rue de Rivoli lent to Monet by the great Impressionist patron Victor Chocquet. It is one of only two from this celebrated suite of four views that remains in private hands, with the others housed at the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris. Shown at the Third Impressionist Exhibition in 1877, it entered the Blaquier-Arrieta Collection via Wildenstein in 1979.
André Derain’s Bateaux au port de Collioure, estimated at $8–12 million, dates from the artist’s watershed summer of 1905 in Collioure alongside Henri Matisse, the crucible from which Fauvism emerged in its most radical form. Alongside it in the sale is Maurice de Vlaminck’s Nature morte à la cruche bleue (1906–07), appearing at auction for the first time and showing the earliest stirrings of his engagement with Cézanne’s influence.
The collection is rounded out by Alfred Sisley’s La Seine à Port-Marly from 1873, a further Pissarro landscape, Maison de Piette à Montfoucault from 1875, and Toulouse-Lautrec’s penetrating Femme assise de profil vers la gauche from 1890.
The Woman Behind The Collection
To speak of the Blaquier-Arrieta Collection without acknowledging Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier‘s central role would be to misrepresent its history. A major figure in Argentine cultural and philanthropic life, she served as President of the Friends of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, as a member of the International Council at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and as a member of the International Committee of the Friends of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Her engagement with art extended well beyond acquisition. She was a builder of cultural institutions and a champion of education and medical research throughout her lifetime.
Philip Hook, author of The Ultimate Trophy: How The Impressionist Painting Conquered The World, frames the collection’s re-emergence in terms that will resonate with anyone who has followed the art market’s evolution over the past fifty years: “For decades now the Blaquier-Arrieta collection has been the stuff of legend: whispered about, kept from public view, it has attained an almost mythical status in the art world. One of the last great private collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, it was formed when major examples by the great names were still within reach. Its re-emergence now marks a historic moment for the market.” The appetite for rare, culturally significant works offered at landmark auction events shows no sign of abating, as illustrated by the extraordinary interest surrounding Princess Diana’s Revenge Dress at Sotheby’s, another once-in-a-generation offering that captured global attention.
Viewing The Collection
Before the auction in New York, the collection will travel internationally, giving collectors and enthusiasts across the world the opportunity to see these long-hidden masterpieces in person. Public exhibitions are scheduled at Sotheby’s Taipei from 5th to 6th October, Sotheby’s Hong Kong from 13th to 15th October, Sotheby’s Paris from 19th to 23rd October, and Sotheby’s New York from 7th to 17th November, ahead of the sale on 18th November 2026.
For a generation of collectors who have known these paintings only through the pages of catalogues and scholarly monographs, the opportunity to stand before them will be, quite simply, historic.
