For years, Joe Lewis’ art holdings have been the subject of market chatter, with particular fascination around works said to be kept on his superyacht. Now the British self-made billionaire is bringing four paintings associated with the “School of London” to Sotheby’s London, set for the Modern and Contemporary Evening Auction on 4 March.
It is the first time Lewis – a currency trader whose family controls Tottenham Hotspur – has publicly sold works from his collection. Leading the group of works is a storied Francis Bacon self-portrait, painted in 1972 in the shadow of devastating personal loss, estimated at £8 million. Two major portraits by Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff’s Children’s Swimming Pool, 11 O’clock Saturday Morning complete the selection.
Together, the four works are expected to realise at least £18.6 million (US$25 million); as of publication, none carried a guarantee.
Joe Lewis
Lewis was born to a Jewish family in London’s East End and grew up above a pub on Bow’s Roman Road. He left school at 15 for his father’s catering business, later turning it into a West End tourist operation selling “medieval banqueting” to American visitors. He sold the company in 1979, became a multimillionaire, and relocated to the Bahamas.
Lewis later ventured into foreign exchange (FX) trading. His wealth surged in the early 1990s when he was widely linked in reports to bets that sterling would be forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). Three years after Black Wednesday boosted his fortune, he reportedly repeated the play by shorting the Mexican peso.
Over the decades, he has built a reported US$5.8 billion fortune, including a superyacht likened to a floating private museum, as well as a long-running stake in Tottenham Hotspur, after buying Sir Alan Sugar’s controlling interest for £22 million in 2001. The shareholding is now held in trust on behalf of his family.
In recent years, however, his reputation has been dented by a US insider-trading case: in early 2024, he was sentenced to a fine and three years’ probation after pleading guilty to providing corporate inside information to others.
Joe Lewis' superyacht, Aviva
David Hockney | Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) | Sold: US$90,312,500, Christie's New York, 2018
In the art market, Lewis is known both for the scale of his holdings – Bloomberg has estimated his collection at around US$1 billion – and for his ties to the auction business. In the 1990s he owned a 30% stake in Christie’s while it was publicly listed; François Pinault bought the holding in 1998 before taking the company private.
His name has also surfaced around major trophy works. He was identified as the buyer of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Gertrud Loew-Felsövanyi (1902), sold at Sotheby’s London in 2015 for US$39 million, and more recently as the seller of David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972), which sold without reserve at Christie’s New York in 2018 for US$90.3 million, then a record for a living artist.
The Panama Papers later linked Lewis to Christie’s landmark 1997 sale of the Victor and Sally Ganz collection, indicating the deal was routed through a dedicated vehicle akin to an early auction guarantee – at a time when he was also among the house’s largest shareholders. The sale set a then-record for a private collection at US$206 million. A highlight, Picasso’s Women of Algiers (version O), made US$31.9 million; it returned to Christie’s in 2015, selling for a whopping US$179.4 million.
Gustav Klimt | Portrait of Gertrud Loew-Gertha Felsőványi | Sold: £24,789,000, Sotheby's London, 2015
Pablo Picasso | Women of Algiers (version O) | Sold: US$179,365,000, Christie's New York, 2015
The four works on offer at Sotheby’s trace the School of London, a loose label for artists who rejected the era’s drift toward abstraction and forged a new path for figurative painting by confronting the human condition head-on.
Assembled over decades by Joe Lewis and his daughter Vivienne, among the movement's most committed champions, the works span four consecutive decades and represent peak moments in each artist’s practice.
Lot 18 | Francis Bacon (1909 - 1992) | Self-Portrait, oil on canvas | Masterpieces from The Lewis Collection
Executed in 1972
36 x 30.5 cm
Provenance:
- Dr. Paul Brass, London (a gift from the artist circa 1983)
- Sotheby’s, London, 30 November 1994, lot 32 (consigned by the above)
- Acquired from the above sale by the present owner
Estimate: £8,000,000 - 12,000,000
Soho was the social and psychological centre of this world, and Francis Bacon was its gravitational pull. He kept a near-daily circuit of drinking spots – the French House and Wheeler’s Restaurant, but above all the Colony Room Club, whose upstairs room became a kind of unofficial common room for artists of disparate ages and stylistic impulses.
Flamboyant and ferociously intelligent, Bacon could be charming and cutting in equal measure. He gambled, lived late, and seemed to work best amid cultivated disorder. His minuscule South Kensington studio was a theatre of chance, where paint-smeared photographs, torn magazines, dust, and debris became part of the working method.
The present painting dates from 1972, a difficult year for Bacon. He was still absorbing the death of his partner, George Dyer, who took his own life in a Paris hotel on the eve of the opening of Bacon’s 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais.
In the months that followed, Bacon returned repeatedly to his own face. “I’ve done a lot of self-portraits,” he said, “really because people have been dying around me like flies and I’ve had nobody else to paint but myself.” In 1972 alone, he produced no fewer than 12 self-portraits on this scale.
Francis Bacon at his studio in London, 1974
Francis Bacon (left) and George Dyer (right)
That February, his doctor, Paul Brass, was called to the studio after a fight left Bacon with an eye injury. Brass later recalled: “I said, ‘You’re going to have to see a plastic surgeon.’ He said, ‘Absolutely not – you can stitch me up now.’ So we laid him on the table in his studio. I offered him a local anaesthetic but he refused. He was so drunk I don’t think he felt anything.”
Brass had previously supported Bacon in a drugs trial in 1968. In a jealous rage, Dyer had planted cannabis in the couple’s home – inside an African statue he claimed had been given to him by the Kray twins – and then called the police. Speaking in Bacon’s defence, Brass testified that Bacon’s severe asthma meant he could never have taken cannabis without becoming very ill.
Grateful for this, and for the face-saving stitches administered in his studio, Bacon left a paper bag behind when he visited Brass’s surgery for a check-up in late 1972. Inside was this painting.
The portrait has since travelled widely. First shown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1975, it was most recently included in Francis Bacon: Human Presence at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 2024. The only self-portrait of this scale from 1972 known to have come to auction, it last appeared on the market at Sotheby’s in 1994, when Brass sold it for £330,000.
Lot 19 | Lucian Freud (1922 - 2011) | Blond Girl on a Bed, oil on canvas | Masterpieces from The Lewis Collection
Executed in 1987
40.6 x 50.8 cm
Provenance:
- Saatchi Collection, London
- Acquavella Galleries, New York
- Acquired from the above in 1997 by the present owner
Estimate: £6,000,000 - 8,000,000
Lucian Freud – once Bacon’s close friend and later a rival – worked very differently. The two, having met in the mid-1940s, were said to see each other almost every day for the next 25 years.
Where Bacon embraced speed and volatility, Freud approached painting with a near-monastic discipline. He worked slowly and insistently, requiring exhaustive sittings from friends, lovers, and family members. Sessions could stretch for hours: sitters were held in sustained scrutiny, sometimes nodding off, only to be repositioned and asked to begin again.
Blonde Girl on a Bed has many of Freud’s hallmarks: thick, heavily worked paint; the sense of time accumulated through prolonged sittings; and a forensic attention to flesh, weight, and gravity.
The sitter, Sophie de Stempel, first met Freud in a Soho pub when she was 19 and studying art. Freud, she recalled, was drawn to her visible discomfort – approvingly describing her as “a very bad model.” “He asked me to model for him and I agreed. At first I was a bit nervous – I had never stripped off like that before – but I soon got used to it,” she said.
Lucian Freud (right) and Bacon (left)
Sophie de Stempel
Lucian Freud | Standing by the Rags (1988-89) | Collection of Tate, London
Freud’s process was physically demanding and could extend over months. He painted standing up, palette in hand, cigarette hovering close to the canvas, leaning repeatedly towards the surface as he worked. De Stempel later said the attention could feel microscopic: “each of my toes was having its portrait painted.”
Freud also worried that sitters might abandon the project, and he relied on conversation and charm to keep them engaged. In de Stempel’s case, it worked: she returned to sit for him on and off for more than eight years, and in the 1980s he made eight major portraits of her.
Acquired from the Saatchi Collection in 1997, Blonde Girl on a Bed has been exhibited internationally, including at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. Other portraits of de Stempel by Freud are held in major public collections, including Tate, London.
Lot 17 | Lucian Freud (1922 - 2011) | A Young Painter, oil on canvas | Masterpieces from The Lewis Collection
Executed in 1957-58
41.9 x 39.1 cm
Provenance:
- Sir Oliver and Lady Scott, Windemere
- Christie’s, London, 28 February 1975, lot 175 (consigned by the above)
- Directors of Baring Brothers & Co., London
- Saatchi Collection, London (acquired by 1990)
- Acquired from the above in 1997 by the present owner
Estimate: £4,000,000 - 6,000,000
Another Freud portrait on offer, A Young Painter (1957-58), depicts Ken Brazier and marks a crucial breakthrough in the artist’s practice: the linear precision of his early portraits gives way to a broader, more tactile handling of paint, with a sharpened psychological presence.
The shift came as Freud’s marriage to Caroline Blackwood was disintegrating. In the bohemian energy of Soho, and under Bacon’s influence, he began to experiment.
Now standing at the easel, he set aside his neat sable brushes and adopted coarse hog’s-hair, loosening his touch without sacrificing his exacting control. He later recalled being galvanised by Bacon’s idea of “packing a lot of things into one single brushstroke”.
Lucian Freud, circa 1956
Freud’s sitters in these years were rarely accidental. Brazier had a difficult upbringing, and Freud took a protective interest in him – securing him a place at the Slade School of Fine Art in 1958 and later a teaching position at Norwich School of Art. “I liked him and never asked myself why,” Freud said. “He was a friend and in a bad way. He was desperate but he was interesting.”
A Young Painter has been exhibited at major institutions including the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Formerly part of the Saatchi Collection, it has not been seen in public since 2012.
Lot 16 | Leon Kossoff (1926 - 2019) | Children’s Swimming Pool, 11 o’clock Saturday Morning, August, oil on board | Masterpieces from The Lewis Collection
Executed in 1969
152.4 x 205.7 cm
Provenance:
- Rosemary Peto, United Kingdom (acquired directly from the artist by 1971)
- Saatchi Collection, London (acquired from the above in 1984)
- Sotheby’s, London, 3 December 1992, lot 59 (consigned by the above)
- Acquired from the above sale by the present owner
Estimate: £600,000 - 800,000
Leon Kossoff occupied a quieter register than Bacon or Freud, though no less intense. London – its streets, bridges, and public places – was his perennial subject, revisited again and again as the city remade itself after the war. “London, like the paint I use, seems to be in my bloodstream,” he said.
The indoor swimming pool in Willesden, near his north London home, became one of those returning motifs. Soon after it opened in 1967, Kossoff began taking his children there for lessons and, over the following years, made numerous drawings – often from the cafeteria overlooking the water – tracking clusters of swimmers and the building’s geometry as seasons and times of day shifted the light and atmosphere.
Back in the studio, he translated these studies into six paintings, distinguished by a lighter touch and an unusual sense of movement, noise, and space. Children’s Swimming Pool, 11 O’clock Saturday Morning is one of them; three of the others are held in UK institutional collections.
Leon Kossoff
Children's Swimming Pool Autumn Afternoon 1971 | Collection of Tate, London
Other Highlight Lots:
Lot 26 | Lucio Fontana (1899 - 1968) | Concetto spaziale, oil on canvas
Executed in 1960
200 x 205 cm
Provenance:
- Galerie Alfred Schmela, Dusseldorf
- Private Collection, Cologne (acquired from the above in 1963)
- Thence by descent to the present owner
Note: Subject to Irrevocable Bids
Estimate: £8,500,000 - 12,000,000
Lot 12 | Claude Monet (1840 - 1926) | Maison de jardinier, oil on canvas
Executed in Bordighera in 1884
60.5 x 73 cm
Provenance:
- Girard & Cie., Paris
- Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris (acquired from the above on 11 April 1888)
- John Singer Sargent, London (acquired from the above on 26 August 1891)
- Christie's, London, 24 and 27 July 1925, lot 303 (consigned by the above)
- Emile Bernheim, Galerie Durand-Ruel and Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris (jointly acquired from the above sale)
- Durand-Ruel Gallery, New York (transferred from the above on 22 April 1926)
- Sarah Choate Sears, Boston (acquired in 1926)
- Amelia Peabody, Boston
- Wildenstein & Co., Ltd., New York (acquired from the above in 1950)
- Domenica Walter-Guillaume, Paris (acquired from the above in June 1953)
- Palais d'Orsay, Paris, 24 November 1977, lot 7
- Helly Nahmad Gallery, London
- Sotheby's, London, 28 June 1978, lot 14 (consigned by the above)
- Private Collection (acquired from the above sale)
- Private Collection, Europe
- Sotheby’s London, 5 February 2007, lot 27 (consigned by the above)
- Acquired from the above sale by the present owner
Note: Subject to Irrevocable Bids
Estimate: £6,500,000 - 8,500,000
Lot 32 | Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 - 1988) |Thin in the Old, acrylic, oil and Xerox collage on panel
Executed in 1986
182.5 x 107 x 24 cm
Provenance:
- Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich
- Akira Ikeda Gallery, Tokyo
- Kantor Gallery, Beverly Hills
- Sotheby's, New York, 18 November 1998, lot 179 (consigned by the above)
- Private Collection, Europe
- Private Collection, Italy
- Sotheby's, Paris, 6 December 2017, lot 54 (consigned by the above)
- Acquired from the above sale by the present owner
Estimate: £6,000,000 - 8,000,000
Lot 39 | René Magritte (1898 - 1967) | Le Buste impassible, oil on canvas
Executed in 1926
120.5 x 80.3 cm
Provenance:
- Galerie Le Centaure, Brussels
- E.L.T. Mesens, Brussels (acquired from the above in 1932)
- Grosvenor Gallery, London (acquired from the above circa 1960-61)
- Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti, Rome (acquired from the above before 1971)
- Private Collection, Switzerland (acquired by 1991)
- Galleria dello Scudo, Verona
- Private Collection, Switzerland (acquired from the above circa 1992)
- Thence by descent to the present owners
Estimate: £4,500,000 - 6,500,000
Lot 37 | Paul Signac (1863 - 1935) | Marseille. Le Port, oil on canvas
Executed in 1934
73.3 x 92.2 cm
Provenance:
- Estate of the artist
- Ginette Cachin (née Signac), Paris (the artist’s daughter; acquired by descent from the above)
- Henri Kréa, Paris (acquired as a gift from the above in May 1968)
- Estate of Henri Kréa
- Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 22 June 2001, lot 17 (consigned by the above)
- Private Collection (acquired from the above sale)
- Christie’s, London, 21 June 2005, lot 23
- Private Collection, Switzerland (acquired from the above sale)
- Christie’s, London, 23 June 2015, lot 23
- Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Note: Subject to Minimum-price guarantee
Estimate: £4,000,000 - 6,000,000
Lot 45 | Dame Barbara Hepworth (1903 - 1975) | Three Obliques (Walk In), bronze with a mottled green, brown and golden patina
Conceived in 1968 and cast in 1969 by Morris Singer Foundry, London, the present work is number 1 from an edition of 2, plus 1 Artist's Cast
288.9 x 466.1 x 330 cm
Provenance:
- Gimpel Fils, London
- Acquired from the above by the Exxonmobil Foundation, February 1972
- Their sale, Sotheby's New York, 3 May 2006, lot 50
- Acquired from the above sale by the present owner
Estimate: £3,500,000 - 4,500,000
Lot 33 | Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987) | Hammer and Sickle, acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
Executed in 1976
183.5 x 218.4 cm
Provenance:
- Carlo F. Bilotti, New York
- Gagosian Gallery, New York
- Private Collection, New York
- Richard Gray Gallery, New York
- The Macklowe Collection, New York (acquired from the above in February 2000)
- Sotheby's, New York, The Macklowe Collection, 16 May 2022, lot 24
- Acquired from the above sale by the present owner
Estimate: £3,000,000 - 5,000,000
Lot 21 | David Hockney (b. 1937) | English Garden, acrylic on canvas
Executed in 1965
122 x 122 cm
Provenance:
- Kasmin Ltd., London
- Galleria dell'Ariete, Milan
- Private Collection, Europe (acquired from the above in 1966)
- Sotheby’s, London, 26 June 1997, lot 15 (consigned by the above)
- Acquired from the above sale by the present owner
Note: Subject to Minimum-price guarantee
Estimate: £2,500,000 - 3,500,000
Lot 38 | Edgar Degas (1834 - 1917) | Scène de ballet, oil on canvas
Executed circa 1885
81.3 x 56.3 cm
Provenance:
- Estate of the artist
- Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, Atelier Degas, 1ère Vente, 6-8 May 1918, lot 79 (consigned by the above)
- Georges N. Bernheim, Paris (acquired by 1921)
- Ludwig and Estella Katzenellenbogen, Berlin (probably acquired from the
- above)
- Ludwig Katzenellenbogen, Berlin (acquired by 1928)
- Tilla Durieux-Katzenellenbogen, Berlin (acquired from the above by 1929)
- Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 9 March 1935, lot 33 (consigned by the above)
- Georgette Lecomte (née Pellerin), Paris (acquired from the above sale through André Schoeller, Paris)
- Private Collection (acquired by descent from the above)
- Christie's, London, 4 February 2008, lot 13 (consigned by the above)
- Private Collection, England (acquired from the above sale)
- Christie’s, London, 23 June 2015, lot 33 (consigned by the above)
- Acquired from the above sale by the present owner
Note: Subject to Minimum-price guarantee
Estimate: £2,500,000 - 3,500,000
Lot 21 | Constantin Brancusi (1867 - 1957) | Une Muse, bronze
Conceived in 1912 and cast by Susse Fondeur from the Istrati-Dumitresco plaster in 1972. This work is number 2 from an edition of 5
Height: 44 cm
Provenance:
- Alexandre Istrati and Natalia Dumitersco, Paris
- Galerie Beyeler, Basel (acquired from the above in June 1974)
- Acquired from the above in 1986 by the present owner
Estimate: £2,000,000 - 3,000,000
Auction Details:
Auction House: Sotheby's London
Sale: Modern and Contemporary Evening Auction
Date and Time: 4 March 2026 | 6:00 pm (London local time)
Number of Lots: 54