Circle the evening of 18 November. In New York, Sotheby’s will stage the Van Gogh auction the art world has been talking about all autumn: a canvas painted in Auvers-sur-Oise in May 1890, carrying an estimate in the region of $180 million. Should it get there, it would comfortably overtake the artist’s auction record of $117.2 million, set at Christie’s in 2022.
The painting, Châtaigniers en fleurs (Chestnut Trees in Blossom), heads Legendary: The Blaquier-Arrieta Collection — twelve paintings gathered by the Argentine collectors Carlos Pedro Blaquier and Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier, valued together at close to $450 million. With New York’s November sales now in sight, both The Art Newspaper and Artprice single it out this week as the lot to watch.
A Van Gogh auction star from his final spring
Van Gogh arrived in Auvers in May 1890, after a year at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Within days, he was at work on a row of chestnut trees in full flower beneath a deep blue sky, with women and their parasols strolling below. He had barely ten weeks left to paint.
What makes the picture so coveted is not only the date but its discretion. According to The Art Newspaper and Artlyst, it has not been shown in public since the Blaquiers acquired it in 1975. The couple began collecting in the 1960s, working with galleries such as Lefevre and Wildenstein, Sotheby’s notes.
Cézanne’s son as Harlequin
The second star of the evening is Paul Cézanne’s Arlequin (1888–90), estimated at around $120 million. The model was the painter’s son, Paul, and the costume recalls the Mardi Gras parades of Cézanne’s childhood in Aix-en-Provence. Sotheby’s describes it as one of only four works in the harlequin series; another hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. A result above estimate could challenge Cézanne’s auction high of $137.8 million, achieved in 2022 by a view of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, The Art Newspaper recalls.
Paris views go under the hammer in New York
For Parisian eyes, the most touching pages of this collection are the city itself. Claude Monet’s Le Jardin des Tuileries was painted in 1876 from an apartment overlooking the gardens, lent by the collector Victor Chocquet, according to Artlyst, which counts it as one of four views of the gardens from that vantage point and one of only two still in private hands; it is estimated at $15–20 million. Camille Pissarro’s La Place du Théâtre-Français et l’avenue de l’Opéra, soleil d’après-midi en hiver (1898), seen from a hotel window above Haussmann’s boulevards, carries an estimate of $30–40 million. Renoir’s boating scene En Canot (1877) is expected to fetch $25–35 million, alongside works by Degas, Gauguin, Derain and Vlaminck.
Simon Shaw, Sotheby’s senior adviser for Impressionist and Modern Art, likened the ensemble to “a miniature Musée d’Orsay”. Fittingly, the pictures made a stop in Paris from 19 to 23 October, in the same season as Art Basel Paris at the Grand Palais, before going on view in New York from 7 to 17 November, according to the auction house.
Parisians who missed the October stopover can still follow the trail at home. The Musée d’Orsay holds Van Gogh’s L’Église d’Auvers-sur-Oise, painted a few weeks after the chestnut trees in that same summer of 1890, and Auvers itself, where the painter rests beside his brother Theo, lies about an hour from the city.
A word of caution before the gavel falls: estimates are not prices, and the buyer’s premium is added on top. Record or not, 18 November promises a rare evening — the chance to see, if only for a few days, a Parisian corner of Impressionism that has spent half a century behind closed doors.
Sources
- The Art Newspaper — 2 November 2026
- Artprice — 3 November 2026
- Beyond Every Art — 2 November 2026
- Sotheby’s — Legendary: The Blaquier-Arrieta Collection — official sale page (auction 18 November 2026)
- Artlyst — 1 October 2026
- The Art Journal — 30 September 2026
- Galerie Magazine — 30 September 2026
Cover photo: Photo: Vincent van Gogh — Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
