Heavyweight paintings by Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff drawn from the formidable Lewis Collection will headline Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary evening sale in London this March. It is the first time works from the collection have been formally designated for auction, a moment that quietly signals a shift for one of Britain’s most discreetly assembled private holdings.
Joe Lewis, the British businessman and investor best known as the long-time majority owner of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, built the collection alongside his daughter Vivienne. It is valued at around $1 billion and is largely composed of Impressionist works and paintings by the so-called School of London. Lewis also owns the Charging Bull sculpture near Wall Street and once held a 30 per cent stake in Christie’s during the 1990s, back when the auction house was still publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange. Those shares were acquired by François Pinault in 1998, who subsequently took the company private.
The School of London — a term coined by R.B. Kitaj — referred to a loose circle of artists committed to figurative painting at a time when abstraction and conceptual practices dominated the conversation. Bacon, Freud and Kossoff stood at its centre, alongside figures such as Frank Auerbach, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin and Michael Andrews. Their work returned insistently to the body, to lived experience, to the stubborn materiality of paint itself.
At Sotheby’s, the mood surrounding the spring sales is noticeably different from the uncertainty that defined much of last year. Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s chairman in Europe, commented on the difficult climate of early 2025, when rising interest rates and geopolitical tensions made the market hesitant, even skittish. “The first six or seven months were very difficult to navigate,” he said. “But something shifted in September.”
Lucian Freud, Blond Girl on a Bed, 1987; Leon Kossoff, Children’s Swimming Pool, 11 O’clock Saturday Morning, August 1969
That shift, he suggests, has sharpened demand for works that are fresh to market, rigorously vetted and sensibly priced — a description Sotheby’s believes fits the Lewis consignments precisely. Supply, Barker noted, has been thin. Exceptional material, when it appears, still commands attention. “When you bring exceptional works to market,” he said, “the response is robust.”
The March sale follows what Sotheby’s describes as an unusually strong autumn season in New York, fuelled in part by the house’s move to the Breuer building and a succession of high-profile estate collections. Auction houses, Barker observed with a hint of candour, tend to reflect the emotional weather of the preceding season. “We’re very much a mood stock,” he said. For now, he senses depth among bidders — and confidence.
The star lot is Bacon’s Self-Portrait, painted in 1972 and carrying a high estimate of £12 million. The work dates to a period of intense introspection for the artist, produced shortly after the death of his partner, George Dyer. Barker described the year as one of extraordinary psychological scrutiny in Bacon’s work. The painting was originally given to the artist’s doctor, Paul Brass, who had treated him following a violent incident in Soho. This detail only deepens the sense of biography embedded in the image.
Two works by Freud follow. Blond Girl on a Bed (1987), estimated at up to £8 million, sits alongside A Young Painter (1957–58), which carries a £6 million high estimate. The latter, Barker suggests, captures a pivotal turning point — the moment Freud’s early, tightly controlled manner began to loosen into the fleshy, tactile paint handling that would define his mature practice.
Completing the group is Kossoff’s Children’s Swimming Pool (1969), offered with a high estimate of £800,000. One of a small number of major swimming pool paintings — several of which are now held in museum collections — the work exemplifies Kossoff’s dense, physically worked surfaces and his fixation on everyday urban life. Barker described it, in typically emphatic auction-room language, as “plus-plus masterpiece quality,” adding that the estimate was “incredibly reasonable.”
The timing of the sale, he suggested, was no accident. The Lewises, like many seasoned collectors, sense a strengthening market and a receptive moment. A spokesperson for the Lewis Collection framed the decision in more reflective terms, emphasising the School of London’s central place within the collection from its earliest formation. The movement, they said, reshaped how artists approached the human condition and continues to resonate today. Bringing these works to auction — difficult though the parting may be — is intended both to highlight the movement’s achievements and to encourage a new generation of collectors to engage with what remains a defining chapter in British art.
For Sotheby’s and the market more broadly, the sale will serve as a test of appetite not only for major names but also for the enduring pull of painting itself.