London. In a famous private museum in South America, 12 rare paintings that have been hidden for decades are going to be auctioned at a price of about 450 million US dollars.
The collection includes Van Gogh’s landscape painting titled ‘Chestnut Trees in Flower’, which is estimated at $180 million. Similarly, Cézanne’s portrait ‘Arlequin’ is said to be worth 120 million dollars. Both these paintings have not been seen in public for the last half century.
It is expected that the works of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and French painter Paul Cézanne will set records in the auction to be held by the world famous auction house “Sotheby’s” in New York on November 18.
The artworks came from the collection of the late Argentinian art collector Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier and her husband, Chinese industrialist Carlos Pedro Blaquier. Their children have put these paintings up for sale.
Sotheby’s impressionist and head of the modern art department, Helena Newman, said that this collection is like a small version of the famous “Musée d’Orsay” in Paris. She said, “In my more than 30 years of experience spent at Sotheby’s, I have never had the opportunity to manage such high-level artworks.”
According to Newman, Van Gogh painted this painting after his release from a mental hospital in May 1890, which reflects his energy and vitality. Van Gogh committed suicide two months after making this painting. Cézanne’s ‘Arlequin’ is one of the four portraits of his son dressed as a clown. The remaining three paintings are in major museums around the world.
The collection also includes Paris cityscapes by Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, Horse Races by Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Scenes from the Boat Sayer, which are valued in the millions of dollars.
Art critic Philip Hook has described the collection as ‘like a fairy tale’, as the collectors had not given these works to any exhibition. He said, ‘Nobody had any concrete information about what was in it. So it is very encouraging that these are now public.
According to Newman, in times of geopolitical and economic uncertainty, billionaires prefer to invest in established and historical ‘masterpieces’. The auction is expected to see competition from US tech billionaires, Middle Eastern institutions and wealthy collectors from around the world.