Van Gogh Unseen for 50 Years Leads Sotheby's $180m November Sale

A Vincent van Gogh painted in the final weeks of his life carries an estimate of around $180m at Sotheby's New York on 18 November — and the painting has not been seen in public since 1975.

Châtaigniers en fleurs (1890) leads Legendary: The Blaquier-Arrieta Collection Evening Auction. Van Gogh painted the blossoming chestnut trees after moving to Auvers-sur-Oise, following a year in the psychiatric asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. He approached his new surroundings with what the catalogue describes as a renewed optimism. The canvas shows flowering chestnuts blooming into a blue sky, with women in parasols and Japanese-inspired dress passing through.

Sotheby's says it expects the work to fetch in the region of $180m. That figure would eclipse the artist's current auction record of $117.2m, set at Christie's New York in November 2022 when Verger avec cyprès (1888) sold during the Paul Allen sale.

What else does the Blaquier-Arrieta collection hold?

The same evening sale includes Paul Cezanne's Arlequin (1888-90), estimated at around $120m. The painting is one of only four works from Cezanne's harlequin series, according to Sotheby's. The artist modelled the figure on his son, Paul, and drew on memories of Mardi Gras parades from his childhood in Aix-en-Provence.

Like the Van Gogh, Arlequin last appeared in public in 1975, when the Argentine sugar magnates Carlos Pedro Blaquier and Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier acquired it. Its unveiling at Sotheby's London was its first showing in half a century.

Before Argentina, the picture passed through the hands of the dealers Ambroise Vollard, Paul Durand-Ruel and Paul Rosenberg. It also hung for two decades at Merton Hall in Cambridge, then the family home of the British branch of the Rothschilds. Another version belongs to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

If Arlequin exceeds its estimate, it could set a Cezanne auction record. The current benchmark stands at $137.79m, paid for a view of Mont Sainte-Victoire at Christie's New York in 2022, again from the Paul Allen collection.

What sells in Paris?

Christie's Paris offers Man Ray's Le Baiser (around 1930) on 13 November, from the collection of Roger Therond, the journalist and longtime editor of Paris Match. Estimate: €250,000 to €350,000.

Therond collected photographs by leading artists of inter-war Paris and had a particular attachment to Man Ray, whom he nicknamed "the Frenzied One". In Le Baiser, two figures hold deliberately ambiguous poses, leaving the relationship between the sitters unclear. Christie's relates that Therond encouraged his children to view the photograph from a distance and imagine different possibilities for the subjects.

The sitter on the left is Lee Miller, the American photographer who began as a fashion model and later worked as a Vogue correspondent during the Second World War. Miller was among the first journalists to reach the Dachau concentration camp after its liberation in 1945 and recorded some of the most haunting photographic evidence of the Holocaust. She famously posed for a photograph while bathing in Adolf Hitler's personal bathtub at his Munich apartment.

What does this change for the market?

The two Blaquier-Arrieta estimates combined approach $300m for a single evening sale, and both works carry plausible record-setting potential against benchmarks set in 2022. What remains untested is whether the 1975-to-2025 absence from the market translates into the premiums these estimates assume — the sale on 18 November will answer that.