A legendary private art collection featuring masterpieces by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne has gone on public display in London ahead of a 450 million dollar auction in New York. The 12 impressionist and modern works from the estate of Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier include a rare 1890 Van Gogh expected to fetch 180 million dollars.
For more than half a century, the private art assembly formed by the late Argentine sugar industry heiress Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier and her husband, Carlos Pedro Blaquier, remained hidden from public view under lock and key at the family estate outside of Buenos Aires. Philip Hook, a former director of impressionist and modern art at Sotheby’s, described the private holdings as the stuff of legend, whispered about and kept from public view.
That secrecy ended when Sotheby’s unveiled a dozen impressionist and modern paintings in London for a two-day preview. The collection will travel to Taipei, Hong Kong, and Paris before heading to New York for an 18 November auction where total sales are projected to top 450 million dollars. Simon Shaw, a senior art adviser at Sotheby’s, likened the grouping to a small museum – a miniature Musée d’Orsay, now opening its doors for the very first time
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Masterpieces by Van Gogh and Cézanne Lead the 450 Million Dollar Sale
The auction features two major anchors: Vincent van Gogh’s Châtaigniers en fleurs and Paul Cézanne’s Arlequin. Painted in May 1890, the Van Gogh canvas captures a chestnut tree in full bloom during the artist’s final two months in the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise, shortly after his discharge from the psychiatric hospital at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Estimated at 180 million US dollars, the painting is one of only eight works from Van Gogh’s Auvers period still remaining in private hands.
Following Van Gogh’s death in July 1890, the painting passed to his brother, Theo, and later belonged to American songwriter and Capitol Records co-founder George Gard Buddy
DeSylva. Scheduling issues kept the canvas out of the initial London exhibition, but auction organizers plan to include it in subsequent stops on the international tour. Alongside it hangs Cézanne’s Arlequin, painted between 1888 and 1890, carrying an estimated price tag in the region of 120 million US dollars. The work is one of only two pieces from Cézanne’s 15-part late figure painting sequence remaining outside museum collections.
Decades of Provenance Linked to London’s Lefevre Gallery
The decision to launch the exhibition in London carries historical weight. Seven of the 12 offered paintings were acquired from the Lefevre Gallery on Bruton Street during the 1970s, when the Argentine couple visited London almost annually to buy art. Helena Newman described the collection as a time capsule of that golden moment
when major impressionist works were still accessible to private buyers. Simon Shaw described the grouping as like a small museum, a miniature Musée d’Orsay now opening its doors for the very first time.
- Claude Monet (Le Jardin des Tuileries)
- Pierre-Auguste Renoir (En Canot (Jeune fille à la barque))
- Camille Pissarro (La Place du Théâtre-Français, soleil d’après-midi en hiver)
- Edgar Degas (Avant La Course)
- Paul Gauguin (Fleurs dans une coupe)
- Alfred Sisley, André Derain, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Maurice de Vlaminck