Japan's Karuizawa Ando Art Museum, the only museum dedicated exclusively to Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, spent HK$34.8 million (US$4.5 million) at Sotheby's Hong Kong on 28 September, snapping up the top two lots from The Foujita Lexicon: Works from the Lewis Collection.
The first was Le rêve (Hommage à La Fontaine), from a series in which the museum already owns a work, which sold for around HK$26.5 million (US$3.4 million). The second, Nu assoupi sur la table, a nude painted on Foujita's signature milky-white ground, fetched HK$8.3 million.
Sotheby's first dedicated single-artist sale in Asia, the 15-lot auction sold every work, with 80% clearing high estimates, for a combined HK$67.2 million (US$8.7 million). The sale came three months after 24 figurative works from the Lewis Collection brought £296 million (US$392.6 million) at Sotheby's London – the most valuable single-owner sale ever held in Europe.
Hong Kong auction preview
Lot 3 | Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita (1886 - 1968) | Le rêve (Hommage à La Fontaine), oil and ink on canvas
Executed in New York in 1949
76.7 x 64 cm
Provenance (Supplemented by The Value):
- Private Collection (acquired directly from the artist in 1951)
- Private Collection, Spain (acquired by descent from the above)
- Christie's, Paris, 20 October 2016, lot 32 (consigned by the above; sold: €782,500)
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Estimate: HK$4,000,000 - 6,000,000
Hammer Price: HK$21,000,000
Sold: HK$26,520,000
Lewis bought the work at Christie’s Paris in 2016 for €782,000, then about HK$6.6 million. Returning to auction this season at Sotheby’s, it opened with auctioneer Oliver Barker at a highly attractive HK$2.5 million and quickly climbed past HK$10 million.
The bidding then settled into a three-way contest between clients represented by Nick Buckley Wood, Private Sales Director, Asia; Fusako Oshima, Specialist, Private Sales, Asia; and Hanae Yamawaki, Business Development, Tokyo.
Barker eventually brought the hammer down at HK$21 million, and the work sold for HK$26.5 million with fees to paddle 6567 – the Karuizawa Ando Art Museum, represented by Yamawaki.
Hanae Yamawaki won the lot for paddle 6567
Oliver Barker flew in from London to take the rostrum for the Lewis sale
Japan's Karuizawa Ando Art Museum, the only museum dedicated exclusively to Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita
Le rêve belongs to a rare series known as Hommage à La Fontaine, made during Foujita's ten-month American sojourn in 1949-50. At least six works from the group are known:
- Classe de chats, acquired by the Karuizawa Ando Museum through Christie’s private sales department in 2023
- Hommage à La Fontaine, now in the collection of the Pola Museum of Art, Hakone
- La fête d’anniversaire, which sold for £7.09 million at Bonhams London in 2018, setting Foujita’s auction record
- Two further works, closely related in composition to Hommage à La Fontaine and La fête d’anniversaire, now in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
- Le rêve (Hommage à La Fontaine), the present work
Classe de chats (1949) | Collection of the Karuizawa Ando Museum
Homage to La Fontaine (1949) | Collection of the Pola Museum of Art, Hakone
La Fête D'Anniversaire (1949) | Sold: £7,096,250, Bonhams London, 2018 (Auction record for the artist)
Painted in New York in 1949, Le rêve (Hommage à La Fontaine) marks a turning point in Foujita's life. After travelling through Latin America and returning to Japan, he spent the Second World War as an official painter to the Imperial Army, only to face accusations of collaboration after the surrender. On 10 March 1949, he left Japan for good, boarding a plane for New York.
Though intended only as a stopover before Paris, the city gave Foujita the freedom to begin again. “I am finally a bird that has the sky all to himself,” he wrote that April. While awaiting his French visa, the sixty-three-year-old artist threw himself into New York: walking its streets in denim overalls, visiting the zoo and the American Museum of Natural History, and observing life in all its forms.
Close-up of the present lot
The fables of Jean de La Fontaine, which Foujita had loved since his early years in Paris, now took on new meaning. “A reaction to violent times,” he later observed, “I conjured the sweetest of subjects, even childish subjects.”
Le rêve draws specifically on Le Songe d’un habitant du Mogol, a fable in which a man dreams that a worldly vizier has entered paradise while a pious hermit burns in hell. A sage explains that the vizier had secretly longed for solitude, while the hermit had craved life at court.
In Foujita's painting, a fox lies undisturbed beneath a small painting-within-a-painting – his adaptation of Millet’s Gust of Wind, with a fox replacing the peasant battered by the storm. The tempest rages inside the frame; outside it, the father fox sleeps on, watched quietly by his mate and cubs.
The scene’s tenderness echoes Foujita’s own longing for reunion with his wife, to whom he wrote constantly, once sketching himself asleep and dreaming of her arrival.
Close-up of the present lot
Jean-François Millet, Gust of Wind | Collection of National Museum Cardiff
Lot 7 | Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita (1886 - 1968) | Nuassoupi sur la table, oil on canvas
Executed in 1927
98.6 x 80.3 cm
Provenance (Supplemented by The Value):
- Private Collection
- Mallet Japan, Tokyo, 22 November 2013, lot 40
- Private Collection (acquired from the above)
- Sotheby's, New York, 8 May 2014, lot 243 (consigned by the above; sold: US$341,000)
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Estimate: HK$2,000,000 - 3,000,000
Hammer Price: HK$6,500,000
Sold: HK$8,3200,000
Born in Tokyo in 1886, Foujita was the son of a general in Japan’s imperial army and grew up in an aristocratic family. France had fascinated him since childhood. He took French lessons as a boy and, after graduating from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts, left for Paris in 1913. In an early letter home, he wrote to his father: “Consider me dead until I become famous.”
Foujita slipped quickly into the life of the Parisian avant-garde. Settling in Montparnasse, he threw lavish parties and made an entrance in his signature look of round tortoiseshell glasses, a neat bowl haircut, and large gold earrings. Friends called him “Fou Fou” – “slightly crazy” in French – and on one occasion he even turned up at the opera in a lampshade, claiming it was standard headwear in Japan.
Before long, Foujita had become one of Montparnasse’s most recognisable figures, moving in the same circles as Modigliani, Picasso, Matisse, and Chagall. Critics praised him, collectors paid fortunes for his drawings, watercolours and oils, and at the height of his fame department stores even dressed mannequins in his image to sell clothes.
Foujita famously adored felines
His most renowned subjects were female nudes and cats. At a time when French audiences often regarded Japanese artists’ attempts at Western painting as inauthentic, he found a way to work within European genres while satisfying the public’s taste for Japonisme.
His canvases combined oil paint with the restraint and precision of traditional Japanese painting, sometimes incorporating touches of sumi ink. Using an ultra-fine menso brush, he drew hair-thin contour lines reminiscent of ukiyo-e woodcuts, then built up the image with delicate layers of translucent oil.
Where the prevailing taste ran to strong colour and heavy texture, he set himself apart with his secret grand fond blanc: a milky-white ground that gave his paintings a pearly luminescence unlike anything Western viewers had seen.
Made from a closely guarded recipe of flaxseed oil, crushed chalk, and silicate powders, this surface allowed his delicate lines to glide without bleeding, while lending skin and fur their distinctive porcelain-like sheen.
Lot 2 | Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita (1886-1968) | Chatte et chaton, oil, pen and ink on canvas
Executed in 1932
46 x 55 cm
Provenance (Supplemented by The Value):
- Private Collection, Buenos Aires
- Private Collection (acquired in 1989)
- Christie's, New York, 2 November 2005, lot 450 (consigned by the above)
- Private Collection, Paris (acquired from the above)
- Private Collection, Europe (acquired from the above circa 2007)
- Christie's, New York, 17 November 2016, lot 1270 (consigned by the above; sold: US$391,500)
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Estimate: HK$2,000,000 - 3,000,000
Hammer Price: HK$4,500,000
Sold: HK$5,760,000
A self‑made billionaire born in London’s East End in 1937, Joe Lewis left school at 15 to work in his father’s catering business, which he built into a successful West End operation before selling it in the late 1970s and relocating to the Bahamas. He went on to amass a fortune through high‑profile currency trades in the early 1990s, notably around “Black Wednesday” in 1992. Today, his wealth is estimated in the region of US$6-7 billion.
To the wider public, Lewis is best known as the owner of Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur. While results on the pitch have fluctuated during his tenure, the club’s commercial value has soared, making Spurs one of the world’s most valuable football clubs.
In the 1990s, he also briefly became the largest shareholder in Christie’s, holding around 30% of the auction house before selling his stake in 1998 to French luxury‑goods magnate François Pinault, who later took Christie's private through his investment vehicle Artemis and remains its owner today.
Other Highlight Lots
Lot 4 | Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita (1886-1968) | Madeleine endormie, pen and ink, ink wash and watercolour on paper
Executed in 1933
33 x 41 cm
Provenance:
- Christie's, London, 30 June 1992, lot 141
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Estimate: HK$300,000 - 500,000
Hammer Price: HK$3,400,000
Sold: HK$4,352,000
Lot 8 | Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita (1886-1968) | Le Mexique, watercolor, pen and ink, brush and ink and ink wash on paper
Executed in 1933
166.5 x 98 cm
Provenance:
- Private Collection, Switzerland (acquired from the artist in 1947)
- Sotheby's, London, 29 June 1977, lot 148 (consigned by the above)
- Private Collection (acquired from the above)
- Private Collection, Europe (acquired from the above in 2009)
- Sotheby's, New York, 7 May 2015, lot 432 (consigned by the above)
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Estimate: HK$1,000,000 - 1,500,000
Hammer Price: HK$3,400,000
Sold: HK$4,352,000
Lot 10 | Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita (1886-1968) | La belle espagnole, oil and ink on canvas
Executed circa 1952
46.1 x 38.1 cm
Provenance:
- Galerie Paul Pétridès, Paris
- Private collection, Belgium
- Private Collection, Paris (acquired by descent)
- Christie's, Paris, 21 October 2016, lot 111 (consigned by the above)
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Estimate: HK$1,500,000 - 2,000,000
Hammer Price: HK$3,000,000
Sold: HK$3,840,000
Lot 11 | Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita (1886-1968) | Les enfants, oil and pen and ink on silk
Executed in 1924
92 x 73 cm
Provenance:
- Galerie Le Centaure, Brussels
- Hautekiet Collection (acquired by 1978)
- Private collection, Belgium (acquired from the above)
- Christie's, London, 21 June 2012, lot 380 (consigned by the above)
- Dr. Walid Juffali Collection, London (acquired from the above)
- Bonhams, London, 1 March 2018, lot 29 (consigned by the estate of the above)
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Estimate: HK$1,200,000 - 1,800,000
Hammer Price: HK$2,400,000
Sold: HK$3,072,000
Lot 1 | Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita (1886-1968) | Mon portrait, watercolour and pen and ink on silk
Executed in 1924
44.5 x 31.5 cm
Provenance (Supplemented by The Value):
- Galerie Le Centaure, Brussels (acquired in 1924)
- Private Collection, Japan
- Sotheby's, London, 29 June 1988, lot 217 (consigned by the above)
- Private Collection, Europe (acquired from the above)
- Sotheby's, London, 25 June 2015, lot 409 (consigned by the above; sold: £75,000)
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Estimate: HK$800,000 - 1,200,000
Hammer Price: HK$2,200,000
Sold: HK$2,816,000
Lot 9 | Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita (1886-1968) | La femme au miroir, watercolor, pen and ink and gold and silver leaf on paper
Executed in 1918
41.5 x 25.6 cm
Provenance:
- Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 12 December 1932, lot 65
- Private Collection, Japan
- Sotheby Parke-Bernet, Inc., New York, 8 November 1979, lot 748
- Private Collection (acquired from the above)
- Private Collection, Washington D.C. (acquired as a gift from the above)
- Sotheby's, New York, 5 November 2014, lot 221 (consigned by the above)
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Estimate: HK$600,000 - 800,000
Hammer Price: HK$1,500,000
Sold: HK$1,920,000
Lot 15 | Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita (1886-1968) | Les trois danseuses, gouache, pastel, watercolor, gold leaf and pen and ink on paper laid on board
Executed circa 1918
37 x 46 cm
Provenance (Supplemented by The Value):
- Private collection (acquired in Paris in the 1920s)
- Christie's, London, 20 May 1998, lot 15 (consigned by the above)
- Tajan, Paris, 4 August 1998, lot 28
- Private Collection (acquired from the above)
- Christie's, Paris, 1 December 2006, lot 336 (consigned by the above)
- Private Collection (acquired from the above)
- Christie's, London, 5 February 2009, lot 113 (consigned by the above)
- Private collection, Europe (acquired from the above)
- Christie's, London, 21 June 2012, lot 227 (consigned by the above)
- Dr. Walid Juffali, London (acquired from the above)
- Bonhams, London, 1 March 2018, lot 28 (consigned by the estate of the above; sold: £58,750)
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Estimate: HK$600,000 - 800,000
Hammer Price: HK$1,200,000
Sold: HK$1,536,000
Lot 13 | Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita (1886-1968) | Fleurs, oil on canvas
Executed in 1963
46.8 x 61.9 cm
Provenance:
- Kimiyo Foujita, Paris (acquired by descent from the artist)
- Sotheby's, New York, 8 May 2014, lot 234 (consigned by the above)
- Acquired from the above by the present owner
Estimate: HK$800,000 - 1,200,000
Hammer Price: HK$1,200,000
Sold: HK$1,536,000
Auction Details:
Auction House: Sotheby's Hong Kong
Sale: The Foujita Lexicon: Works from the Lewis Collection
Date: 28 September 2026
Number of Lots: 15
Sold: 15
Sale Rate: 100%
Sale Total: HK$67,224,000