Sotheby’s unveiled a private collection of 12 works in London on Wednesday 30 September. At its head is a Van Gogh painted at Auvers-sur-Oise in May 1890. The Art Newspaper and artnet put the whole collection at about $450 million and the Van Gogh alone at around $180 million, which would be a record for the artist at auction. Sotheby’s catalogue gives the picture as Châtaigniers en fleurs, chestnut trees in blossom, and dates it to 24 May 1890, four days after Van Gogh arrived in the village where he died two months later. On the auction house’s own pages every estimate reads “upon request”; the figures come from the press, after the unveiling. The paintings will be sold in New York on 18 November, after a tour that stops in Paris from 19 to 23 October.
Twelve paintings, from Monet’s Tuileries to Vlaminck
Six of the twelve works are already on Sotheby’s site. Claude Monet’s Le Jardin des Tuileries is dated 1876. Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s En Canot, a girl in a boat, is from 1877, “the year the Impressionists first took their name”, in Sotheby’s words. Camille Pissarro’s view of the Place du Théâtre-Français and the Avenue de l’Opéra on a winter afternoon is from 1898, Paul Cézanne’s Arlequin from 1888 to 1890, and Maurice de Vlaminck’s still life with a blue jug from around 1906. The press adds a racing pastel by Edgar Degas, Avant la course, a Toulouse-Lautrec, a Sisley and a Derain, and Sotheby’s mentions a late Tahitian still life by Paul Gauguin. The figures reported after the unveiling are about $180 million for the Van Gogh and $120 million for the Cézanne. Then come the Pissarro at $30 million to $40 million, the Renoir at $25 million to $35 million, the Degas at $20 million to $30 million, the Monet at $15 million to $20 million and the Vlaminck at $2 million to $3 million. Sotheby’s describes the whole as “more akin to a private museum than a traditional collection”.
Four days in Auvers
Van Gogh arrived in Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris, on 20 May 1890. In a little over two months he made 74 paintings and 33 drawings, according to the Musée d’Orsay, and he died there on 29 July. Sotheby’s dates the chestnut trees to 24 May, his first week in the village. The canvas measures 70 by 58 centimetres. “Van Gogh painted his radiant view of Auvers-sur-Oise in the final months of his life, at the height of his powers,” the catalogue says. It was last shown in public at the Guggenheim in New York in 1964, The Art Newspaper reports, and it was not among the works on view in London this week. If it sells at its reported estimate, it will pass the current auction record for the artist, the $117.2 million paid at Christie’s New York in 2022 for Verger avec cyprès, an orchard with cypresses from 1888.
“It’s a market-defining moment to have an 1890 Van Gogh come through. It’s incredibly rare.” Helena Newman, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, to The Art Newspaper, 30 September 2026.
Cézanne’s son as Harlequin
The Cézanne is a family portrait in costume. Sotheby’s writes that “Cézanne’s assertive Arlequin depicts his own son and marks painting’s turn toward structure and abstraction”. It is one of four late figure paintings for which his son Paul posed, artnet reports, and another version hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The canvas measures 92.7 by 65.7 centimetres. At around $120 million it would not reach Cézanne’s auction record, the $137.8 million paid in 2022 for La Montagne Sainte-Victoire, but The Art Newspaper notes that no comparable portrait has appeared at auction since 1988. The Renoir has a rarity of its own. According to the same paper, En Canot has never been shown in London.
London, Taipei, Hong Kong, Paris, New York
London had the first look, for two days. According to The Art Newspaper, five works were unveiled there: the Cézanne, the Pissarro, the Monet, the Vlaminck and the Renoir. Then it travels. Taipei has it on 5 and 6 October and Hong Kong from 13 to 15 October, Paris from 19 to 23 October and New York, for the final view, from 7 to 17 November. The sale is on Wednesday 18 November at 6pm in New York. The Paris dates fall in the week of Art Basel Paris at the Grand Palais, whose public days run from 23 to 25 October, as set out in our guide to the October fairs. It is the second great picture to begin a tour this week: Sotheby’s has also taken Turner’s Rome, from Mount Aventine to Rome ahead of its London sale in December.
Why $450 million, and why now
Sotheby’s has backed the sale itself. Helena Newman confirmed to The Art Newspaper that the auction house has guaranteed the collection, without giving the amount, and said she expects it to reach “in the region of $450m”. The reasoning is scarcity. “At public auction, there hasn’t been anything at this level,” she said, calling the collection “a time capsule of that golden moment”. Simon Shaw, Sotheby’s senior advisor for Impressionist and Modern art, told artnet that “it’s the collection of the year” and that “you literally have the feeling that you’re walking through the Met or the Musée d’Orsay”. Collections assembled by one pair of eyes and kept together for decades rarely reach the market whole. This one was begun in the 1960s, and most of the works were bought in the 1960s and 1970s, according to artnet. Its sale will show how much the top of the market is ready to pay for pictures of this quality.
The Luxury.it perspective
Sotheby’s own phrase for the collection, “a private museum”, is the right way to read it. Twelve pictures chosen over decades trace modern art from the first Impressionist experiments of the 1870s to the Fauves, and after 18 November they are likely to go to different owners. The tour is the only chance to see them together. For a European reader the dates to keep are 19 to 23 October, when the collection is in Paris, the city where several of these pictures were painted, a few days before Art Basel opens to the public. If the Van Gogh reaches its reported estimate, the record will be the story of the night. The quieter story is about time. These paintings were bought half a century ago, and the market is only now seeing them again.
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