What to Watch in Sotheby’s Masterpieces From the Lewis Collection Sale

British billionaire and art collector Joe Lewis made his fortune in currency trading and went on to own the Tottenham Hotspur football club and a string of other enterprises. He purportedly approaches collecting with the same selectivity and market focus as he approached business, while also finding inspiration in his early encounters with art. “Lewis grew up amid the creative ferment of post-war London, the city of Bacon, Freud and Kossoff, where the School of London first ignited his passion as a collector,” Sotheby’s chairman Oliver Barker said in a statement. That passion eventually matured into an interest in figuration, specifically, and he built “one of the world’s most important private collections of Modern art.”

Over roughly 25 years, Lewis and his daughter Vivienne assembled a museum-quality trove of modern figurative painting, acquiring works by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Amedeo Modigliani, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Gustave Caillebotte, Chaïm Soutine and Pablo Picasso, among others. In June, major works from that collection are headed to Sotheby’s in London in the Masterpieces From the Lewis Collection auction, which could become the most valuable single-owner sale ever held in the U.K. Notably, while Lewis is letting go of quite a few works, he and his family are not hitting pause on collecting. “While this public sale represents a significant staging post, our journey as collectors is far from over—we remain committed to the avant-garde painters of today, much of whose work is informed by the artists showcased here,” a spokesperson for the Lewis Collection said in a statement.

The presale estimate of £150 million to £200 million puts it ahead of the Pauline Karpidas sale at Sotheby’s last September, which totaled £101 million with fees. And a March auction of just four works from the Lewis Collection—drawn from the School of London and including pieces by Bacon, Freud and Leon Kossoff—brought £35.8 million with fees, suggesting the market’s appetite for this material is very much intact. Many of the works going on the block in June have not appeared on the open market in decades; some never have. Here’s what to watch:

Gustav Klimt’s 1902 portrait of Bildnis Gertrud Loew (est. £20-30 million)

One of Vienna’s most celebrated physicians, Dr. Anton Loew, commissioned Klimt to paint his daughter, 19-year-old Gertrud Loew. The resulting portrait, which shows her wreathed in gossamer fabric, was described by Ludwig von Hevesi, the preeminent Viennese art critic of the era, as “the most sweet-scented poetry the palette is able to create.” Klimt’s full-length society portraits are among the rarest objects in the art market—in the last 25 years, only five significant examples have appeared at auction, each exceeding its high estimate, often by a wide margin. In November 2025, Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer sold for $236.4 million at Sotheby’s New York, achieving the second-highest price ever for a work of art at auction. Two years earlier, Dame mit Fächer sold at Sotheby’s London for £85.3 million, becoming the most valuable artwork of any kind ever sold in Europe. Bildnis Gertrud Loew will likely follow suit.

Amedeo Modigliani’s Homme à la pipe (Le notaire de Nice) (est. £12-18 million)

By 1918, the year this work was painted, Modigliani had perhaps two years to live. He and Jeanne Hébuterne had quit Paris for Nice, where his dealer Léopold Zborowski hoped the Mediterranean air might do for his tuberculosis what medicine could not. Away from Montparnasse, Modigliani found new subjects among the locals—workers, farmers, tradesmen, and the man he called the ‘Notary of Nice’ sits in a dark suit and black cap, pipe in hand, his elongated face and almond eyes unmistakably Modigliani’s. Homme à la pipe (Le notaire de Nice) has not been displayed publicly in nearly 50 years.

Egon Schiele’s Danaë (est. £12-18 million)

Schiele was 19 when he painted Danaë, and the work emerged from a moment when the artist was pulling away from the academic tradition toward something rawer and more psychologically exposed. The painting bears the clear influence of Klimt’s 1907 treatment of the same subject, but where Klimt’s feels ornamental, Schiele’s feels human. In May 2017, Danaë, carrying an estimate of $30-40 million, was withdrawn from a Sotheby’s New York sale and is returning to the block in London with an adjusted estimate, making it one of the most closely watched lots of the season.

Francis Bacon’s Two Studies for Self-Portrait (est. £8-12 million)

George Dyer, whom Bacon painted more than 40 times, died in a Paris hotel room in 1971, just two days before the opening of Bacon’s major retrospective at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais. His death would send Bacon into the most emotionally raw and ambitious period of his career. Two Studies for Self-Portrait, painted six years later at the height of his international fame, is emblematic of the artist’s grief: two life-scale apparitions, pink and bruised purple, dissolving into darkness, mouths mangled, eyes sealed shut in pain. Exhibited widely across Europe and Asia during Bacon’s lifetime, the duo of works was preceded by a related self-portrait from the Lewis Collection that sold in March for £16 million, double its low estimate.

Gustave Caillebotte’s Portrait de Paul Hugot (est. £3.5–4.5 million)

When Caillebotte submitted his monumental Portrait de Paul Hugot (1878) to the Fifth Impressionist Exhibition in 1880, the critic Armand Silvestre called the work “by far his best piece.” Hugot was Caillebotte’s close friend, neighbor and one of his most committed patrons; he amassed one of the largest private collections of the artist’s work ever assembled. The work appeared in the recent Musée d’Orsay retrospective devoted to Caillebotte, but has not been seen on the market in over 30 years. In fact, fewer than a half dozen major works of this kind by the artist have ever come to auction, and the painting’s estimate reflects that scarcity.

Lucian Freud’s Woman in a Grey Sweater (est. £3-4 million)

Freud painted this quietly commanding portrait of Susanna Chancellor (a friend and frequent muse) over several months in 1987 and 1988, and the artist’s familiarity with her shows—there is a sense of genuine presence and of connection that isn’t always present in his works. Woman in a Grey Sweater passed through the Saatchi Collection before Lewis acquired it in 1997, and in the years since, has been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Britain, Whitechapel Gallery, LA MOCA and the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.

“Right from the outset, we have been drawn to art that reflects what it means to be human: to works that capture the people who inhabited these artists’ worlds—their friends, muses, lovers and contemporaries—but in very different ways that embody the ambitions and preoccupations of each artist,” the collection spokesperson added. A selection of Joe Lewis’s holdings is currently on view at Sotheby’s New York, giving American collectors an early look at material that, in several cases, has been out of circulation for a generation.

More in Auctions