The Minute a Painting Bought in Private Finally Came Back Into View

Sometime during the 1970s, on one of their annual trips to London, Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier and her husband Carlos walked into the Lefevre Gallery on Bruton Street and bought a painting. It wasn't a single purchase — over that decade, they acquired seven works there, eventually building a collection of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces that would become one of the finest held privately in Argentina. One of those paintings was a Van Gogh: Châtaignier en fleurs roses et blanches, painted in 1890. After the Blaquiers brought it home to their estate, La Biznaga, outside Buenos Aires, almost no one saw it again. It hadn't been shown publicly since a Guggenheim exhibition in 1964 — and it stayed that way, quite literally kept under lock and key, for the rest of both of their lives. Nelly died in 2020. Carlos died in 2023.

On September 30, 2026, that changed. The painting went on public view in London, the first stop on a world tour — Taipei, Hong Kong, Paris, and finally New York — ahead of its sale at Sotheby's this November. Sotheby's has estimated it could fetch $180 million, which would make it the most expensive Van Gogh ever sold at auction, surpassing the current record of $117 million set in 2022. Helena Newman, Sotheby's chairman of Impressionist and Modern art, called it "a market-defining moment to have an 1890 Van Gogh come through" — the kind of painting that essentially never resurfaces, because almost no one who owns one ever lets it go.

What's striking, underneath the eye-watering estimate, is how private the whole thing was for so long. The Blaquiers weren't buying for attention. Nelly chaired the Friends of Argentina's National Museum of Fine Arts and would occasionally show pieces to collectors and museum directors, but the paintings themselves mostly just lived at La Biznaga, seen by almost no one, for over fifty years. There was a specific minute, on some unrecorded day in the 1970s, when that Van Gogh changed hands in a London gallery — a private decision between two people who simply loved the work enough to want to live with it. Nobody photographed that moment. No auction house tracked it. It just happened, quietly, the way most meaningful decisions do, and then it stayed exactly as it was for the next fifty years.

That's true of plenty of decisions that never make headlines at the time, either. The minute you decided to keep something, commit to something, or bring something home — not for anyone else, just for yourself — rarely gets marked the way it deserves. It just happens, and then it either matters for decades or it doesn't. Own The Minute exists for that kind of private, unphotographed decision. For $3, you can claim the exact clock-time minute something became yours, permanently, with a keepsake certificate as proof it happened — so decades from now, the minute doesn't have to depend on memory, or on someone eventually finding it again by accident.

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