A dozen Impressionist and post-Impressionist artworks collectively valued at almost half a billion dollars are going up for auction after sitting unseen for decades in a fabled private collection in South America. Sotheby's auction house said Wednesday that works by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne are expected to smash records for the artists in the Nov. 18 sale in New York. 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, reports the AP. It also includes works by Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
They include van Gogh's landscape "Châtaigniers en fleurs" (Chestnut Trees in Flower), estimated at $180 million and painted two months before he took his own life, and Cézanne's portrait "Arlequin," which carries an estimate of $120 million. Neither has been seen in public for half a century. Art expert Philip Hook said the collection "really is the stuff of legend," because the collectors did not loan out the works for exhibitions. "No one knew really what was in it," and what's been revealed is a collection that "is focused on getting one representative work by each of the major names (of Impressionist and post-Impressionist art), and that is incredibly difficult to do. They succeeded with huge, huge style and success." Indeed, Sotheby's head of Impressionist and modern art described the collection as like a "mini- Musée D'Orsay."
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