[Arlequin by Paul Cezanne (1888-90)]
[Exhibition space]
[Helena Newman looking at Arlequin]
Helena Newman (interview): “I mean, it’s incredibly rare for a collection of this quality, museum calibre and content to come to the market. They’re just 12 works but each and every one of them is of the calibre that it could sit in the Musée d’Orsay. It’s really rare and also very unknown previously. This is like a discovery for large parts of the world. Most people would have never stood in front of these paintings. They haven’t been seen in public for some 50 years or so.”
[Philip Hook approaching En Canot by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1877)]
[Hook looking at artwork]
Philip Hook (interview): “The Blaquier collection was really the stuff of legends. We in the art market knew that there was this very good collection in Argentina, but it was a bit of an El Dorado because no one quite knew what it contained. And it’s only really now, today that these pictures have been first revealed to the public in their entirety. And one sees what an extraordinary collection it was.”
[Le Jardin des Tuileries by Claude Monet (1876)]
[Trees]
[Monet’s signature]
[Nature morte a la cruche bleue by Maurice de Vlaminck]
Helena Newman (interview): “I mean, I don’t know when we will ever see if ever we will see a collection like this again on the market. I mean, this was put together primarily in the 1970s in an era when you could walk into the Lefevre Gallery in London and see great impressionist art available for sale. I mean, this is not how nowadays you would encounter works of this calibre. They come really only once in a generation to the market. And whilst I think we will continue to see great art collections come in future seasons and future years, I don’t think anything will quite have the makeup of this group of works.”
[Assistant with La Place du Theatre-Francais et l’avenue de l’Opera, soleil d’apres-midi en hiver by Camille Pissarro]
[La Place du Theatre-Francais et l’avenue de l’Opera, soleil d’apres-midi en hiver by Camille Pissarro]
[Assistants hanging Arlequin by Paul Cezanne]
Philip Hook (interview): “This is Cezanne at his absolute best. And you just don’t get pictures of this quality by Cezanne coming on to the market with any sort of regularity. The last one which perhaps you could compare it with was the ‘Card Players’ which was sold privately to the Qatari Royal Museum, 10-15 years ago for $250 million.”
[Photographers in exhibition space]
[Assistants with En Canot by Pierre-Auguste Renoir]
Helena Newman (interview): “Well I’m standing here in front of this masterpiece by Renoir from 1877, ‘En Canot.’ It’s one of his great modern works, in a way. Just painted in the same year as the third Impressionist exhibition, the same year that the Impressionists began calling themselves Impressionists. And it’s a real masterpiece of his modern painting of French society.”
[En Canot]
This script was provided by The Associated Press.