Sotheby’s London staged one of the most significant auction evenings in the city’s recent history on 24 June, when 25 works from the collection of British billionaire Joe Lewis produced a total of £296.3 million, the highest sum ever achieved for a single-owner collection sold in Europe. The full evening, which combined the Lewis lots with a broader modern and contemporary sale, raised £393.4 million with fees, breaking Sotheby’s own record for an evening of this kind in the British capital.
The result surpassed the previous European benchmark set by the Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé collection, which realised €373.9 million in Paris in 2009. Only one lot from the Lewis section failed to sell. The pre-sale estimate for the collection had been £190 million, a figure the room left well behind.
The evening’s top lot was Amedeo Modigliani’s Nu assis au collier, painted in 1917, which sold for £48.2 million against an estimate of more than £45 million. The painting belongs to the series of late nudes that caused a scandal in Paris during Modigliani’s only solo exhibition, which police shut down on grounds of obscenity. The work had not appeared at auction for more than three decades and had not been exhibited publicly in Europe since 1981, making it one of the most closely watched lots of the season.
Highlights From the Lewis Collection: L to R Klimt, Modigliani, Freud
The second-highest result went to Gustav Klimt’s Bildnis Gertrud Loew from 1902, which sold for £36.2 million to an Asian private collector. The portrait depicts a member of a prominent Viennese Jewish family who fled Austria following the Nazi annexation in 1938. Asian collectors were a conspicuous presence throughout the sale: Sotheby’s reported that buyers from Asia bid on half of the Lewis lots and acquired more than a third of the works offered.
Lucian Freud’s Sleeping by the Lion Carpet, painted between 1995 and 1996, realised £29.3 million. Both Freud’s Portrait of Paul Hugot from 1878, which sold for £10.3 million, and Gustave Caillebotte’s Portrait de Paul Hugot from 1878 had been held in the Lewis Collection for around 30 years before coming to market. The Caillebotte, a portrait of the artist’s close friend and fellow painter Paul Hugot, was shown in the Musée d’Orsay’s major retrospective of the artist in 2024.
Nine works in total sold for more than £10 million each. Among the standouts was a René Magritte gouache, La Belle promenade from 1965, which established a new auction record for a work on paper by the artist when it sold for £16 million, four times its upper estimate. The result drew audible gasps from the room, an unusual response even at this level of the market. It reflected both the rarity of the work and the exceptional quality of its condition. The gouache had not been seen publicly for nearly sixty years and came from a particularly concentrated period in Magritte’s late career. That a work on paper should achieve parity with oil paintings by the same artist says something about the appetite in the room.
Kazimir Malevich’s Head of a Peasant from 1911 sold for £3 million, more than 14 times what the Lewis family paid for it when they acquired it in 1993.
The Lewis Collection was assembled over several decades by Joe Lewis and his daughter Vivienne, and centres on modern figurative painting with a particular emphasis on Viennese portraiture and the School of London. Many of the key works had been kept out of public view for long periods, which contributed to the sense of occasion around the sale. Collectors and specialists had been anticipating the appearance of these works for years.
The result carries significance beyond the numbers. London’s auction market has been navigating a difficult period since Brexit, with dealers, galleries and auction houses all reporting disruptions to the movement of art, changes in buyer behaviour and a perception in some quarters that the city has lost ground to Paris as a centre for selling work at the highest level of the market. A single evening does not settle that argument. Still, a result of this scale, achieved in front of a packed room with genuinely competitive bidding across the lots, provides a counterargument that will be difficult to dismiss.
Sotheby’s described the evening as a record-breaking moment for the London house. Whether it marks a turning point for the broader market here remains to be seen, but for one night at least, the room felt like a place where important things were happening.
Top Photo: Nu assis au collier, by Amedeo Modigliani (1917-18).Rayan Bamhayan, Courtesy Sotheby’s