For much of the past year, London has watched New York claim one blockbuster single-owner sale after another.
On Wednesday evening, 24 June, the British capital fired back. Sotheby's staged a marathon double-header that pulled in a combined £393.4 million ($520.7 million), which the auction house confirmed as the highest total ever recorded in a single night of European auctions. The first sale, Masterpieces from the Lewis Collection, realized £296 million ($390 million), setting a record for a single-owner collection sale in London. The Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction that followed achieved £97.1 million ($128.1 million).
The Lewis sale alone, drawn from the holdings of billionaire financier and former Tottenham Hotspur owner Joe Lewis, racked up £296.3 million with fees, making it the most valuable single-owner collection ever sold in the UK. That total nearly tripled the previous British record of £101 million, set by the Pauline Karpidas collection last September. It also surpassed the benchmark set by the Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé collection, which realized €373.9 million in Paris in 2009.
The evening's top lot carried a complicated history. Amedeo Modigliani's 1917 Nu assis au collier sold on a single bid for £48.2 million with fees, the highest price ever paid for a work by the Italian artist at auction in Europe. It is one of just seven full nudes that appeared in Modigliani's December 1917 solo show at Galerie Berthe Weill in Paris. Those paintings caused a scandal when Weill displayed them in the gallery window, prompting police to intervene on grounds of indecency. Lewis had purchased the work in 1995 for $12.4 million.
Born and raised in London's East End, Lewis felt a natural affinity as a collector with the School of London painters, such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. Now 89, he built the collection with his daughter Vivienne over almost five decades. Their holdings expanded well beyond British figuration to encompass Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Chaim Soutine, and Gustave Caillebotte.
Klimt's Bildnis Gertrud Loew, pursued by seven bidders, sold to a private Asian collector for $47.9 million. Lucian Freud's Sleeping by the Lion Carpet, which critic Martin Gayford once called "the best painting Freud ever painted," sold at its £25 million low estimate. René Magritte's La Belle promenade established a new auction record for a work on paper by the artist at £16 million.
Asian buyers were a significant force, bidding on half of the 25 lots offered and accounting for around a third of the auction's total. Only a single lot failed to sell, an 1880 Edgar Degas, meaning the collection achieved a 96 percent sell-through rate. The Lewis family chose not to seek a financial guarantee from the auction house, an unusually confident position for a consignment of this scale.
In the Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction that followed, Claude Monet's Nymphéas (1907) sold for £40.8 million with fees, becoming the most valuable Impressionist work sold at auction in Europe in over a decade.
"Overall, last night felt pretty epic," said Clare Keiller, director of research at the London art advisory firm Beaumont Nathan. Sotheby's insists the sale should not be read as an exit from the art world, noting that Vivienne Lewis remains an active buyer. For a city that has spent years fielding questions about its declining relevance, Wednesday's result offered a pointed, if temporary, answer. For London, the sales provided a timely demonstration that the city can still compete for the global art market's most valuable consignments.
Check topics and authors from this story to see more stories like this in your personalized feed and receive updates when new work is published.
