12 paintings hidden for 50 years head to auction for $450M, including a $180M Van Gogh and $120M Cézanne

A collection of twelve impressionist and post-impressionist artworks valued at almost half a billion dollars is going up for auction on November 18, 2026, after sitting unseen for decades in a fabled private collection in South America. The paintings come from a collection amassed by the late Argentine art collector Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier and her sugar magnate husband, Carlos Pedro Blaquier, and are being sold by their children.They include van Gogh's landscape “Châtaigniers en fleurs” (Chestnut Trees in Flower) estimated at $180 million, and Cézanne’s portrait “Arlequin,” which carries an estimate of $120 million. Neither has been seen in public for half a century. Sotheby's auction house said on Wednesday that works by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne are expected to smash records for the artists in the sale to be held in New York.Helena Newman, Sotheby's head of impressionist and modern art, said the collection was like a “mini-Musée d’Orsay,” the Paris museum that holds one of the world’s greatest collections of Impressionist and post-Impressionist artworks. “In my 30-plus years at Sotheby’s, I’ve never had the privilege of handling a collection of quite this content and ca...