Sotheby's Sells the $450 Million Blaquier-Arrieta Collection in New York

For the next week, the most valuable room in New York charges nothing at the door. The twelve paintings of the Blaquier-Arrieta collection are hanging at Sotheby's on Madison Avenue, on public view through November 17, and most of them have not been seen by the public in over fifty years. They belonged to Carlos Pedro Blaquier and Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier, the Argentine couple behind the Ledesma fortune, who bought them quietly in the 1970s and then kept them at home. On Wednesday, November 18, at 6 p.m., their children sell all twelve in a single evening auction Sotheby's has titled, without much understatement, "Legendary."

The house estimates the twelve together in the region of $450 million. Sotheby's called the collection "a miniature Musée d'Orsay" and "the stuff of legend," and for once the sales language undersells the arithmetic. Only 29 paintings have ever sold at auction for more than $100 million. This one sale sends two pictures into the room with estimates above that line, on the same night, from the same family's walls.

The first is the Van Gogh. Châtaigniers en fleurs — chestnut trees in blossom over an Auvers village street — was painted around May 24, 1890, days after Vincent van Gogh arrived in Auvers-sur-Oise and weeks before he died there. It is one of only eight landscapes from those final weeks still in private hands. The Blaquiers bought it from Wildenstein in New York in 1975; its last public exhibition had been at the Guggenheim in 1964. Sotheby's lists the estimate on request, and the figure the house is guiding toward is in the region of $180 million.

Hold that number against the record it would have to beat. The most ever paid for a Van Gogh at auction is $117.2 million, for Verger avec cyprès from Paul Allen's collection at Christie's in 2022. The estimate on Châtaigniers sits more than $60 million above it, before any buyer's premium. An estimate is a house's invitation, not a result — the room decides on the night — but houses do not print invitations like this one by accident.

The second picture has never been to auction at all. Paul Cézanne painted Arlequin between 1888 and 1890, dressing his son Paul in the red-and-black diamonds of a carnival harlequin. He painted four Harlequins. Three are in museums. This is the only one left in private hands, and it passed from dealer Ambroise Vollard to Paul Rosenberg to Lord Rothschild before the Blaquiers bought it from the Lefevre Gallery in London, also in 1975. Its estimate is in the region of $120 million — under Cézanne's $137.8 million record, set by La Montagne Sainte-Victoire in 2022, and close enough that a competitive room erases the gap.

Ten more paintings fill out the evening, and the depth below the two headliners is its own argument. Degas's pastel Avant la course carries an estimate of $20 to $30 million. Gauguin's Fleurs dans une coupe is estimated at $10 to $15 million, André Derain's Bateaux au port de Collioure at $8 to $12 million. Around them: a Monet of the Tuileries gardens from 1876, a Renoir of a girl in a rowboat, two Pissarros, a Sisley river scene, a Toulouse-Lautrec, a Vlaminck still life. Seven of the twelve came through the Lefevre Gallery in London. Read top to bottom, the sale is a compressed history of French painting from the early Impressionists to the Fauves, assembled by two people buying for their own walls in a decade when that was still something a family could do.

Sotheby's has guaranteed the family an undisclosed amount regardless of what happens on the night, which tells you where the house thinks the risk sits. The paintings toured before they sell — unveiled in London on September 30, shown in Hong Kong, Taipei and Paris, the Van Gogh held back for Hong Kong only — and the New York exhibition is the last stop. After November 17, the next time most of these pictures are seen in public will be up to whoever buys them.

Across town, Christie's runs its own marquee week at Rockefeller Center, and the two houses have effectively split the calendar between them. Sotheby's opens the week on Monday, November 16, with its Now & Contemporary evening sale. Christie's starts Tuesday, November 17, with its 20th Century Evening Sale, led by Gustav Klimt's landscape Litzlbergkeller at an estimate of $60 to $80 million, and closes the evening program Thursday, November 19, with its 21st Century Evening Sale, where a 1983 Basquiat unseen in public for over twenty years carries an estimate in the region of $30 million. Christie's puts its whole week — more than 850 works — at in excess of $800 million. Its Marquee Week pictures are on free view at Rockefeller Center through November 17 as well.

Two houses, five evenings, well over a billion dollars of estimates. The season's center of gravity is still one room on Madison Avenue on Wednesday night, when a chestnut tree painted in the last spring of Van Gogh's life meets the market for the first time in fifty years. Previously will publish the results of the Blaquier-Arrieta sale on the night of November 18 — what the room actually paid, measured against every estimate on this page. More auction stories live on the Provenance front.