Lewis Collection Tops £296m, Becoming Europe’s Most Valuable Single-Owner Sale

News / Fairs and Auctions Modigliani Nude That Scandalised Paris Leads Sotheby’s Lewis Collection Sale Philippa Kelly

London’s summer auction season opened with a landmark result on 24 June as Sotheby’s Masterpieces from The Lewis Collection sale realised a total of £296.3 million, making it the most valuable single-owner collection ever sold in Europe. This historic total surpassed the record set by the Yves Saint Laurent–Pierre Bergé Collection, which realised €373.9 million in Paris in 2009.

Nine works sold for more than £10 million, led by Amedeo Modigliani’s Nu assis au collier (1917) at £48.2 million, against an estimate in excess of £45 million. One of the artist’s celebrated late nudes, the painting belongs to the series that sparked controversy in Paris in 1917 when police shut down Modigliani’s only solo exhibition. It had not appeared at auction for more than three decades and had remained unexhibited in Europe since 1981, making it one of the most closely watched lots of the season.

Assembled over several decades by British businessman Joe Lewis and his daughter Vivienne, the Lewis Collection is centred on modern figurative painting, tracing a line from Viennese portraiture to School of London intensity. Many of its key works had remained in private hands for decades before coming to market in this sale.

Lucian Freud’s Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (1995–1996) realised £29.3 million, while Gustave Caillebotte’s Portrait de Paul Hugot (1878) sold for £10.3 million—both had remained in the collection for around 30 years. The latter, depicting the artist’s friend and fellow painter, was exhibited in the Musée d’Orsay’s major Caillebotte retrospective in 2024.

The second-highest result went to Gustav Klimt’s Bildnis Gertrud Loew (Gertha Felsőványi) (1902), which sold for £36.2 million to an Asian private collector. The portrait depicts a member of a prominent Jewish family in Vienna who later fled Austria following the Nazi annexation in 1938. Asian buyers were a significant presence during the sale: Sotheby’s reported that Asian collectors bid on half of the Lewis collection lots and bought more than a third of the works on sale.

The sale also produced a series of notable milestones. René Magritte’s La Belle promenade (1965) established a new auction record for a work on paper by the artist, selling for £16 million. Unseen publicly for nearly 60 years, the gouache came from a pivotal period in Magritte’s late career. Kazimir Malevich’s Head of a Peasant (1911) realised £3 million—more than 14 times the price paid when it entered the Lewis Collection in 1993.