Sotheby's has secured one of the largest single-owner art consignments in years: roughly $450 million worth of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings assembled by the late Argentine collectors Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier and Carlos Pedro Blaquier, according to ARTnews and other art-market outlets. The house is said to have offered a significant financial guarantee to win the collection away from rival Christie's ahead of this fall's marquee evening sales.
The headline lot is Vincent van Gogh's 1890 painting "Châtaignier en fleurs roses et blanches" (Chestnut Tree in Pink and White Blossom), which advisers estimate could sell for $150 million to $200 million. A work from Paul Cézanne's celebrated Harlequin series is expected to fetch more than $120 million, while paintings by Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro and Pierre-Auguste Renoir are each projected to bring upward of $25 million, per reporting from art-market coverage of the consignment.
Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier was described by The New York Times in 1995 as the owner of Argentina's largest private art collection. She died in 2020; her husband, the industrialist Carlos Pedro Blaquier, died three years later. The works had reportedly been tied up in a regulatory dispute in Argentina over export penalties, which was resolved when authorities waived the proposed fine, clearing the way for the paintings to leave the country for sale abroad.
A blockbuster season builds
The Blaquier consignment lands as auction houses stock their fall and winter Impressionist and Modern evening sales, traditionally the art market's biggest revenue events of the year. Sotheby's has not announced an exact sale date for the individual works, though such marquee single-owner collections are typically unveiled in the run-up to November's evening sales in New York.
Winning a collection of this size is also a competitive signal in an art market that has cooled from its 2022 peak, with major auction houses increasingly relying on guarantees — pre-negotiated minimum prices paid to consignors regardless of the final hammer result — to lock in trophy pieces. A strong result for the Blaquier paintings would offer a read on whether demand for blue-chip Impressionist works has held up even as broader contemporary-art sales have softened this year.
Sotheby's is expected to exhibit highlights from the collection in the coming weeks before the works go under the hammer.
