A Sotheby’s auction that began with 25 works from the collection of the billionaire Joe Lewis in London on Wednesday night raised £393.4 million with fees, about $520.7 million, breaking the auction house’s record for an evening of modern and contemporary sales in the British capital.
Sotheby’s said the amount raised by the Lewis lots alone — £296.3 million — was also the highest total ever achieved for a London sale of artworks from a single owner. It had been estimated to sell for £190 million.
In a packed room, most of the lots sold for far above their pre-auction valuations; only one lot failed to sell. Early in the sale, bidders gasped when a René Magritte gouache work on paper sold for £16 million, four times the upper estimate, which was the price of an oil painting by the artist.
Experts said the success of the double-header evening auction event could help restore the city’s Brexit-battered reputation as a global hub for selling the world’s most expensive art.
“This was a perfect example of what London can do,” said the international dealer Thaddaeus Ropac. “This was the best sale we’ve had here in years. It showed that if you offer great quality material people will go the extra mile.”
The top price at the sale, “Masterpieces From the Lewis Collection,” went to Amedeo Modigliani’s 1917 “Seated Nude With Necklace,” which sold for £48.2 million. It was one of 25 masterworks by famed modern and contemporary artists offered for sale by Lewis, the Bahamas-based currency trader whose family owns Tottenham Hotspur, one of England’s most valuable soccer franchises. (Lewis also made headlines in 2024 when a New York judge fined him $5 million for insider trading, although President Trump pardoned him last year.)
“A lot was down to Joe Lewis,” Ropac said. “He’s a Londoner and he wanted his works to be sold in London.”
The Lewis lots were followed by an auction of 40 modern and contemporary pieces from other owners, including an ethereal 1907 Claude Monet painting of the surface of his lily-pond in Giverny, France. It sold for £40.8 million, leading a session that raised £97.1 million.
Britain’s 2016 vote to leave the European Union has hurt the country’s trade and investment in recent years, including its art market. Before Brexit, Sotheby’s and Christie’s would each host three weeks of modern and contemporary art sales in London every year. Now, Christie’s has opted out of the summer slot.
Christine Bourron, the chief executive of the art market analytics firm Pi-eX, said its data showed that British auction sales had declined to $1.6 billion last year from $3.4 billion in 2015, a drop of 47 percent. (Equivalent sales in the United States declined 25 percent, to $5.1 billion in 2025 from $6.5 billion in 2015.)
“The Brexit referendum marked the beginning of a sustained decline in the U.K.’s share of the global public auction market,” she said.
But Wednesday’s $520.7 million total from a single night of sales far exceeded Sotheby’s record for its evening modern and contemporary sales in London, a combined $310 million in February 2015 — the height of the pre-Brexit art market. That suggests a return to form for London as an international auction center, albeit at only one of the two main auction houses.
For Lewis, the evening’s proceeds added to the £35.8 million that four works made him at Sotheby’s in March. He was also the seller of David Hockney’s iconic “Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures),” which went for $90.3 million in New York in 2018, setting an auction record for an artwork by a living artist.
Lewis had bought “Seated Nude With Necklace” — one of Modigliani’s rare and coveted paintings of a naked subject — in 1995 for $12.4 million. (In 2015, the artist’s “Nu Couché” sold at Christie’s for $170.5 million to the Chinese billionaire Liu Yiqian.) It was one of the few Lewis works that attracted subdued competition on Wednesday, selling to a single telephone bid. “It was a bit boring,” said the collector Alex Lachmann, alluding to how Modigliani’s most expensive nudes have tended to be more overtly voluptuous.
The Lewis entries also included another very different seated female nude: Lucian Freud’s “Sleeping by the Lion Carpet,” a monumental portrait of a social services supervisor, which sold for £29.3 million. It depicts the same model as Freud’s “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping,” which sold at auction in 2008 for $33.6 million. That buyer was later revealed to be the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.
Other Lewis highlights included Gustav Klimt’s 1902 full-length “Portrait of Gertrud Loew (Gertha Felsovanyi)” that the collector bought in 2015 for £24.8 million, also at Sotheby’s in London. Eleven years later, this tender portrayal of the young wife of a Hungarian industrialist sold for £36.2 million.
A 1922 bronze cast of Edgar Degas’s famous wax sculpture “Little Dancer of Fourteen Years,” first exhibited at the sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881, had similarly broad appeal. One of 29 casts of the sculpture, it sold for £25.1 million.
The sale of such top-level artworks is part of the wider trend known as the Great Wealth Transfer, in which affluent older people are finding effective ways to pass down their wealth to younger relatives. In the United States, as much as $84 trillion is expected to pass down to heirs through 2045.
“There were some very full retail prices at the Lewis sale,” said Anthony Brown, managing director of the Connaught Brown gallery in London. “I don’t think New York could have got better prices for a lot of those things.”
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