London gets its first public look this week at one of the art market's most mythologised private holdings. Sotheby's has opened a London exhibition of the Blaquier-Arrieta collection, the trove of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings assembled by the Argentine family behind the Ledesma sugar business and kept almost entirely out of public view — and off the market — for more than six decades. The headline picture did not make the trip. Vincent van Gogh's "Châtaignier en fleurs roses et blanches," painted at Auvers-sur-Oise in May 1890 during the final months of the artist's life and last shown publicly in New York in 1964, stayed behind for scheduling reasons. Sotheby's carries it at $180 million (£135 million) — well above Van Gogh's auction record of $117 million, set in 2022 — and Helena Newman, the house's chairman for Europe, has suggested it could climb past $200 million. The London display centres on the rest of the twelve-work group, including Paul Cézanne's 1888–90 "Arlequin" alongside Monets, Renoirs and works by Pissarro, Degas, Gauguin and Sisley. Neither the Van Gogh nor the Cézanne has ever been offered at auction. The unveiling has already drawn the market's critical machinery: writing in The Telegraph, Alastair Sooke detected something darker in the Van Gogh, pointing to its stormy blue sky and a spectral figure he read as the artist himself moving toward a coffin-like form — while conceding the interpretation is subjective. The timing is no accident: London is in the middle of an Impressionist season, with the Royal Academy's French Riviera exhibition and the National Gallery's Renoir show both newly opened. After London, the collection travels to Hong Kong and Paris before returning for the New York evening sale in November, where Sotheby's is pitching the group as a "mini Musée d'Orsay" that has not been seen together for half a century.