For decades, Carlos Pedro Blaquier and Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier quietly lived with the sort of paintings that have, for the most part, disappeared from private collections: major works by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, and others, many of which have not been seen publicly in more than half a century.
Now the whole group is coming out at once. Sotheby’s will offer the 12 works in New York on November 18, with a combined estimate in the region of $450 million. At the top are Van Gogh’s Châtaigniers en fleurs, estimated around $180 million, and Cézanne’s Arlequin, at around $120 million. Both could beat the artists’ current auction records.
The Blaquiers assembled most of the collection in the 1970s, when, if you can believe it, paintings of this caliber could still be bought from London dealers instead of via bidding wars at auction. Seven of the 12 works came through Lefevre Gallery on Bruton Street, including the works by Cézanne, Renoir, Degas, and Gauguin on offer, as well as one by Pissarro. What follows is the complete group, from an 1873 Sisley to two explosions of Fauvist color painted more than three decades later.
Vincent van Gogh, Châtaigniers en fleurs (1890)
Image Credit: Courtesy Sotheby’s. Estimate: around $180 million.
Van Gogh painted Châtaigniers en fleurs only days after arriving in Auvers-sur-Oise, where he would spend the final two months of his life. A huge flowering chestnut tree nearly consumes the canvas, its canopy constructed from short, densely packed strokes of green, yellow, and orange against a deep blue sky. The painting has an unusually strong provenance: after Van Gogh’s death it passed to his brother Theo and later Theo’s widow and son, before eventually belonging to publisher Samuel Fischer and Capitol Records cofounder George “Buddy” DeSylva. The Blaquiers bought it from Wildenstein in 1975, and it has not been publicly exhibited since.
Paul Cézanne, Arlequin (1888–90)
Image Credit: Courtesy Sotheby’s. Estimate: around $120 million.
There are only four paintings in Cézanne’s “Harlequin” series, and this is the only one still privately owned. Cézanne’s teenage son, Paul, served as the model, dressed in the familiar red-and-black diamonds, cocked white hat, and wooden sword. But there is little comedy here: the figure is elongated, stiff, and strangely impassive, qualities that make the painting feel considerably less like indebted to Commedia dell’Arte than a precursor to early 20th-century modernism. The picture has not been publicly shown since 1975 and previously belonged to the Rothschild family, hanging for roughly two decades at Merton Hall in Cambridge.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, En Canot (Jeune fille à la barque), 1877
Image Credit: Courtesy Sotheby’s. Estimate: $25 million–$35 million.
Painted in 1877, the year of the Third Impressionist Exhibition, En Canot belongs to the same period as Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette. The young woman in the boat is believed to be Marguerite “Margot” Legrand, a favorite Renoir model who also appears in Bal du moulin de la Galette. At around 3 feet wide, Sotheby’s says it is the largest Renoir from the 1870s to reach the market and the most important work of any kind by the artist to appear at auction in more than 20 years. It has never previously been offered at auction.
Camille Pissarro, La Place du Théâtre-Français et l’avenue de l’Opéra, soleil d’après-midi en hiver (1898)
Image Credit: Courtesy Sotheby’s. Estimate: $30 million–$40 million.
By the 1890s, Pissarro had exchanged the countryside for one of Impressionism’s other great subjects: modern Paris. He painted this view from his room at the Grand Hôtel du Louvre, looking down on the Place du Théâtre-Français and Avenue de l’Opéra. The high vantage point turns Haussmann’s Paris into an almost diagrammatic arrangement of boulevards, carriages, pedestrians, buildings, and winter light. Executed in the largest format Pissarro used for these Paris scenes, the painting has not been exhibited publicly since 1958 and has never appeared at auction.
Edgar Degas, Avant la course, (ca. 1893)
Image Credit: Courtesy Sotheby’s. Estimate: $20 million–$30 million.
Degas returned to horse racing throughout his career, but Avant la course captures an oddly quiet part of the spectacle: the nervous lull before the race begins. Horses overlap and turn away from the viewer while brightly dressed jockeys punctuate a field of pinks and greens. At roughly 25 by 29 inches, it is one of the largest fully worked racing pastels by Degas remaining in private hands. It has not been publicly exhibited since 1968 and has never before been offered at auction.
Paul Gauguin, Fleurs dans une coupe (ca. 1899–1901)
Image Credit: Courtesy Sotheby’s. Estimate: $10 million–$15 million.
Gauguin painted this compact still life during his final years in Tahiti, when he returned to a genre he had long used to experiment with color and composition. Flowers and fruit crowd the canvas, but the arrangement is anything but conventional: the objects, tablecloth, and foliage seem to push into one another, flattening the space. Sotheby’s points in particular to Cézanne’s influence. Gauguin had owned a Cézanne still life since the 1870s and supposedly said he would part with it only “after my last shirt.”
Claude Monet, Le Jardin des Tuileries (1876)
Image Credit: Courtesy Sotheby’s. Estimate: $15 million–$20 million.
Before haystacks, water lilies, and Giverny came Monet’s brief fascination with Paris. He painted Le Jardin des Tuileries from a fifth-floor apartment on the Rue de Rivoli, with views across the gardens toward the city. It is one of four views Monet made from the apartment, which had been lent to him by the collector Victor Chocquet, and one of only two still privately owned; the others are in the Musée d’Orsay and Musée Marmottan Monet. The work appeared in the Third Impressionist Exhibition in 1877.
André Derain, Bateaux au port de Collioure (1905)
Image Credit: Courtesy Sotheby’s. Estimate: $8 million–$12 million.
Derain spent the summer of 1905 in Collioure with Henri Matisse, and the paintings that resulted helped launch Fauvism. Here, the harbor is almost beside the point: boats, sails, water, and shoreline dissolve into streaks of red, yellow, green, and blue. The paint often barely covers the canvas, giving the picture the improvised quality of a sketch despite the radical confidence of its color. Sotheby’s calls it one of the strongest examples of Derain’s Fauvist period still in private hands; it last appeared at auction nearly 30 years ago.
Maurice de Vlaminck, Nature morte à la cruche bleue (1906–07)
Image Credit: Courtesy Sotheby’s. Estimate upon request.
Vlaminck takes the relatively tame ingredients of a still life—pitcher, plate, fruit—and subjects them to the Fauvist treatment. The blue-green jug looms over a tabletop of oranges, reds, pinks, and turquoise, with objects defined as much by clashes of color as by conventional modeling. Painted between 1906 and 1907, the work also catches Vlaminck beginning to absorb Cézanne, an influence that would increasingly pull him away from the unfettered color of his earliest Fauvist pictures. The painting is appearing at auction for the first time.
Alfred Sisley, La Seine à Port-Marly (1873)
Image Credit: Courtesy Sotheby’s. Estimate upon request.
Sisley painted La Seine à Port-Marly in 1873, just before the first Impressionist exhibition and at a moment when the movement’s visual language was still taking shape. The scene is hardly spectacular: a river, bare trees, low buildings, and a smoking chimney beneath a broad gray sky. That restraint is precisely the point. Where the collection’s later pictures push toward van Gogh’s charged brushwork or Fauvism’s unnatural color, Sisley is still working out how an ordinary stretch of the modern French landscape could become a subject in itself. Sotheby’s identifies it as one of the collection’s two earliest Impressionist landscapes.
Camille Pissarro, Maison de Piette à Montfoucault, effet de neige (1875)
Image Credit: Courtesy Sotheby’s. Estimate upon request.
The second Pissarro in the collection couldn’t be farther from his later view of Paris. Painted in 1875 at Montfoucault, it shows a snow-covered rural landscape framed by bare trees, with a house partially obscured by vegetation. Pissarro repeatedly visited the area in the 1870s, and the picture belongs to the intensely experimental early years of the Impressionist movement. In the context of the Blaquier-Arrieta collection, it also makes a neat bookend with the 1898 Paris streetscape, showing how far Pissarro traveled from rural France to the modern metropolis over the course of his career.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Femme assise de profil vers la gauche (1890)
Image Credit: Courtesy Sotheby’s. Estimate upon request.
Toulouse-Lautrec’s contribution is a portrait of a seated woman in a brilliant red blouse, shown in profile against the patterned interior behind her. The compressed space, abrupt cropping, and emphasis on contour are already recognizably Lautrec, as is the sense that the sitter has been caught in an unguarded moment rather than formally posed. Painted in 1890, the work provides another route out of Impressionism: less interested in atmosphere than in the psychology, posture, and graphic immediacy of modern life.
