For more than 50 years it was held in a private art collection with an “almost mythical status” that was likened to a miniature version of Paris’s Musée d’Orsay. But on Wednesday a painting by Vincent Van Gogh created during the last two months of his life has gone on display before it is put up for auction with a value of $180m (£136m). Châtaigniers en fleurs (Chestnut Tree in Flower) was painted in May 1890 shortly after Van Gogh arrived in the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise.
He died just weeks later. Most Van Gogh works from this period now hang in the world’s leading museums – but Châtaigniers en fleurs is one of 12 impressionist and modern masterpieces from the collection of the late Argentinian collector Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier, who died in 2020. Philip Hook, a former director of impressionist and modern art at the auction house Sotheby’s and a regular expert on BBC One’s Antiques Roadshow, said the opening of the collection to buyers was a “historic moment”.
They will be sold along with 10 other significant works by Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Alfred Sisley, André Derain, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Maurice de Vlaminck. All 12 paintings, which are expected to fetch more than $450m in total, have gone on display at Sotheby’s in London on Wednesday for two days before being flown to Taipei, then Hong Kong and Paris before the auction on 18 November in New York. Van Gogh painted at least four major works featuring chestnut trees in Auvers-sur-Oise during a period of optimism and energy after his release from a psychiatric hospital at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
After Van Gogh’s death in July 1890, Châtaigniers en fleurs passed to his brother, Theo. A subsequent owner was George Gard “Buddy” DeSylva, the US songwriter and film producer who co-founded Capitol Records. It is one of only eight paintings Van Gogh produced in Auvers that are in private hands.
Simon Shaw, a senior art adviser at Sotheby’s, added that the collection felt “like a small museum – – a miniature Musée d’Orsay, now opening its doors for the very first time”.
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