Sotheby’s London Sale of Joe Lewis Collection Sets European Record at £296.3 Million
A single-owner auction in London has rewritten the European record books. Sotheby’s sold Joe Lewis’s collection for £296.3 million ($392.6 million), the highest total ever achieved by a single-owner sale in Europe. Of the 25 lots offered, only one failed to sell, a result that signals how resilient demand remains for blue-chip modern and Impressionist art at the very top of the market.
Amadeo Modigliani’s rare nude, Nu assis au collier (1917–18), led the evening at £48.2 million ($63.9 million), comfortably clearing its estimate after a brief contest opened by Oliver Barker, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe. Lewis had acquired the work at Christie’s in 1995 for $12.4 million, a reminder of how dramatically trophy works can appreciate over time.
Another closely watched lot was Lucian Freud’s Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (1995–96), a portrait of Sue Tilley that sold for £29.3 million ($38.8 million). The painting had been in Lewis’s collection since 1996, when he acquired it from Acquavella Galleries, Freud’s longtime New York representative. Lewis and his daughter Vivienne built the collection with a particular emphasis on artists associated with the School of London, and that focus was reflected in the sale’s strongest results.
Among the evening’s other highlights was Gustav Klimt’s Bildnis Gertrud Loew (Gertha Felsőványi) (1902), which brought £36.2 million ($47.9 million) after drawing interest from an Asian private collector. The portrait had once hung in New York’s Neue Galerie, the museum founded by Leonard A. Lauder, who bought it in 2013 after it resurfaced amid a dispute involving the Klimt Foundation and the sitter’s descendants.
The sale also delivered solid results for Edgar Degas’s Petite danseuse de quatorze ans, a 1922 cast of the sculpture first conceived in 1879–81, which sold for £25.1 million ($33.3 million). Egon Schiele’s Danaë (1909) reached £17.9 million ($23.6 million), while Gustave Caillebotte’s Portrait de Paul Hugot (1878) climbed to £10.3 million ($13.6 million) after 10 minutes of bidding, more than doubling its high estimate. René Magritte’s La Belle Promenade proved the night’s surprise, rising to £16 million ($21.2 million) and setting a new record for a work on paper by the artist.
Lewis, the former owner of Tottenham Hotspur, had already seen strong results from related works earlier this year, when four pieces by Freud, Francis Bacon, and Leon Kossoff brought $47.7 million at Sotheby’s. The latest sale suggests that, even in a selective market, exceptional provenance and museum-grade names continue to command extraordinary competition.
