Cézanne's Harlequin, Unseen for Half a Century, Heads to Sotheby's With a $120 Million Estimate
A young man in a red and black diamond costume steps forward, a white bicorne hat on his head and a baton under his arm. His face is calm, almost a mask. Paul Cézanne painted his son Paul in this Harlequin costume several times at the end of the 1880s. One of those canvases, the only one still in private hands, has not been seen in public for about half a century. On 18 November 2026 it will be offered at Sotheby’s in New York with an estimate of around $120 million, as part of the Blaquier-Arrieta Collection. The picture below is our vintage poster version of Cézanne’s Harlequin; the painting itself is shown further down.
What: Paul Cézanne, Arlequin (Harlequin), 1888–1890, oil on canvas, 92 × 65 cm
Where: Sotheby’s, New York
When: 18 November 2026, Blaquier-Arrieta Collection sale
Estimate: around $120 million
Artist’s auction record: $137.8 million, La Montagne Sainte-Victoire, Christie’s New York, 2022
Section: Auctions & Market
What is being sold
Arlequin is one of four costume pictures Cézanne painted between 1888 and 1890. One, Mardi Gras, shows two figures, Pierrot and Harlequin, and is now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. The other three focus on Harlequin alone, and his son Paul posed for the figure. According to the Associated Press, the other three works of the group are in major museums, which makes this the only one a private buyer can still acquire.
The canvas measures 92 by 65 centimetres. The Cézanne catalogue raisonné traces a long chain of owners: the dealer Ambroise Vollard, collectors and galleries in Berlin, Paris and Oslo, Lord Rothschild in Cambridge and the London dealers Alex Reid & Lefevre, before it was bought by Carlos Pedro Blaquier and Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier of Buenos Aires. The couple did not lend their pictures to exhibitions, which is why it has been out of public view for so long. Their children are now selling twelve works from the collection, together expected to bring about $450 million.
Why it matters
Sotheby’s has said it expects the sale to set records. For Cézanne, the bar is high: his auction record is $137.8 million, paid at Christie’s New York in November 2022 for La Montagne Sainte-Victoire from the collection of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. An estimate of around $120 million puts Arlequin within reach of that figure, but beating it would need competition in the room. The star of the same sale is Van Gogh’s Chestnut Trees in Blossom, estimated at about $180 million, which we wrote about when the sale was announced. The collection also includes works by Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and Degas.
The painting behind the story
The Harlequin behind our poster, and shown further down this story, is the version in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, given in 1985 by Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon after passing through Vollard and the great Cézanne collector Auguste Pellerin. The gallery calls it “austere and elegant”. Where Paul’s face is carefully portrayed in Mardi Gras, here it becomes a mask, and the figure is built like one of Cézanne’s still lifes: the diamonds of the costume, the white hat and the diagonal of the baton lock together against the plain wall. For a painter best known for apples, mountains and card players, the theatre costume seems to have offered a way of turning a person into shape and colour. For another Cézanne that tested the market this autumn, read our story on Cézanne’s Blue Plate in Hong Kong.
Hang Cézanne’s Harlequin — the red and black diamonds, the white hat, the calm masked face — as a vintage art poster from the Sapiens Verbum print shop.
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Hang Cézanne’s Harlequin as he painted it, as a print, canvas or framed print from the Sapiens Verbum print shop.
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💬 Over to you: Would you pay $120 million for a painting nobody has seen in fifty years? And where in the world are you reading from? Tell us in the comments.
Sources
- Associated Press: Works by Van Gogh and Cézanne up for sale in Sotheby’s $450 million auction, 30 September 2026
- Colombia One: Sotheby’s to auction long-unseen Impressionist masterpieces, 5 October 2026
- The Paintings, Watercolors and Drawings of Paul Cézanne (online catalogue raisonné): Arlequin, FWN 670
- National Gallery of Art: Harlequin, 1888–1890
- Wikipedia: Pierrot and Harlequin (Mardi Gras)
- HENI: The radical landscape that set Paul Cézanne’s auction record
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