Sotheby’s New York lines up a major Blaquier-Arrieta sale

On 30 September 2026, Sotheby’s in New York announced the sale of twelve Impressionist and modern masterpieces from the Blaquier-Arrieta collection. Two works stand out in particular: Vincent van Gogh’s Châtaignier en fleurs roses et blanches, painted in 1890, and Paul Cézanne’s Arlequin, dated around 1889.

The auction house says the group could bring in more than $450 million. For the art market, that kind of figure matters not only as a headline: it can reset expectations around rarity, provenance and the public visibility of major works that rarely come back to auction.

What these paintings let us see

For artists and painting lovers, the interest goes beyond the estimate. In the Van Gogh, the tree becomes a field of energetic marks and layered paint; in the Cézanne, form is built through the tension between colour, contour and spatial structure.

A sale like this also reminds us how modern painting is still read today. Seeing these works in the context of an auction highlights the craft behind them: the handling of paint, the construction of space, and the decisions of composition that continue to shape how painters and draughtsmen think about an image.