A Sotheby’s public sale that started with 25 works from the gathering of the billionaire Joe Lewis in London on Wednesday evening raised £393.4 million with charges, about $520.7 million, breaking the public sale home’s report for a night of recent and modern gross sales within the British capital.
Sotheby’s stated the quantity raised by the Lewis heaps alone — £296.3 million — was additionally the very best whole ever achieved for a London sale of artworks from a single proprietor. It had been estimated to promote for £190 million.
In a packed room, a lot of the heaps bought for a lot above their pre-auction valuations; just one lot didn’t promote. Early within the sale, bidders gasped when a René Magritte gouache work on paper bought for £16 million, 4 occasions the higher estimate, which was the worth of an oil portray by the artist.
Specialists stated the success of the double-header night public sale occasion may assist restore town’s Brexit-battered repute as a worldwide hub for promoting the world’s costliest artwork.
“This was an ideal instance of what London can do,” stated the worldwide supplier Thaddaeus Ropac. “This was the very best sale we’ve had right here in years. It confirmed that when you provide nice high quality materials folks will go the additional mile.”
The highest worth on the sale, “Masterpieces From the Lewis Assortment,” went to Amedeo Modigliani’s 1917 “Seated Nude With Necklace,” which bought for £48.2 million. It was one in every of 25 masterworks by famed fashionable and modern artists supplied on the market by Lewis, the Bahamas-based forex dealer whose household owns Tottenham Hotspur, one in every of England’s most dear soccer franchises. (Lewis additionally made headlines in 2024 when a New York decide fined him $5 million for insider buying and selling, though President Trump pardoned him final yr.)
“Quite a bit was all the way down to Joe Lewis,” Ropac stated. “He’s a Londoner and he needed his works to be bought in London.”
The Lewis heaps have been adopted by an public sale of 40 fashionable and modern items from different homeowners, together with an ethereal 1907 Claude Monet portray of the floor of his lily-pond in Giverny, France. It bought for £40.8 million, main a session that raised £97.1 million.
Britain’s 2016 vote to depart the European Union has harm the nation’s commerce and funding lately, together with its artwork market. Earlier than Brexit, Sotheby’s and Christie’s would every host three weeks of recent and modern artwork gross sales in London yearly. Now, Christie’s has opted out of the summer season slot.
Christine Bourron, the chief govt of the artwork market analytics agency Pi-eX, stated its information confirmed that British public sale gross sales had declined to $1.6 billion final yr from $3.4 billion in 2015, a drop of 47 %. (Equal gross sales in america declined 25 %, to $5.1 billion in 2025 from $6.5 billion in 2015.)
“The Brexit referendum marked the start of a sustained decline within the U.Ok.’s share of the worldwide public public sale market,” she stated.
However Wednesday’s £393.4 million whole from a single evening of gross sales far exceeded Sotheby’s report for its night fashionable and modern gross sales in London, a mixed £310 million in February 2015 — the peak of the pre-Brexit artwork market. That implies a return to kind for London as a world public sale middle, albeit at solely one of many two primary public sale homes.
Lewis had purchased “Seated Nude With Necklace” — one in every of Modigliani’s uncommon and coveted work of a unadorned topic — in 1995 for $12.4 million. (In 2015, the artist’s “Nu Couché” bought at Christie’s for $170.5 million to the Chinese language billionaire Liu Yiqian.) It was one of many few Lewis works that attracted subdued competitors on Wednesday, promoting to a single phone bid. “It was a bit boring,” stated the collector Alex Lachmann, alluding to how Modigliani’s costliest nudes have tended to be extra overtly voluptuous.
The Lewis entries additionally included one other very completely different seated feminine nude: Lucian Freud’s “Sleeping by the Lion Carpet,” a monumental portrait of a social providers supervisor, which bought for £29.3 million. It depicts the identical mannequin as Freud’s “Advantages Supervisor Sleeping,” which bought at public sale in 2008 for $33.6 million. That purchaser was later revealed to be the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.
Different Lewis highlights included Gustav Klimt’s 1902 full-length “Portrait of Gertrud Loew (Gertha Felsovanyi)” that the collector purchased in 2015 for £24.8 million, additionally at Sotheby’s in London. Eleven years later, this tender portrayal of the younger spouse of a Hungarian industrialist bought for £36.2 million.
A 1922 bronze solid of Edgar Degas’s well-known wax sculpture “Little Dancer of Fourteen Years,” first exhibited on the sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881, had equally broad enchantment. Considered one of 29 casts of the sculpture, it bought for £25.1 million.
The sale of such top-level artworks is a part of the broader development often known as the Nice Wealth Switch, by which prosperous older individuals are discovering efficient methods to go down their wealth to youthful relations. In america, as a lot as $84 trillion is anticipated to go all the way down to heirs by means of 2045.
“There have been some very full retail costs on the Lewis sale,” stated Anthony Brown, managing director of the Connaught Brown gallery in London. “I don’t suppose New York may have gotten higher costs for lots of these issues.”
