Joe Lewis, the British billionaire best known as the owner of Tottenham Hotspur, is also one of the world’s most formidable art collectors. This week in London, a group of his paintings took centre stage at Sotheby’s.

Held on 24 June, the evening sale brought together 25 figurative paintings from Lewis’ trove, all offered without guarantees. All but one found buyers, yielding a 96% sell‑through rate and a total of £296 million (US$392.6 million), making it the most valuable single‑owner auction ever staged in Europe.

Asian collectors were notably active throughout the evening, acquiring the sale’s top two lots: a sensuous nude by Amedeo Modigliani, which realised £48.23 million (US$63.9 million) with fees, and Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Gertrud Loew, sold for £36.16 million (US$47.9 million) to a telephone bidder on the line with Wendy Lin, Sotheby’s Asia chairman. 

Buyers from Asia also picked up Lucian Freud’s Woman in a Grey Sweater, Pablo Picasso’s Baigneuses, sirènes, femme nue et minotaure and blue-period portrait Angel Fernández de Soto. In all, bidding from Asia accounted for roughly one‑third of the sale total.

The Lewis Collection brought in £296 million

Lot 13 | Amedeo Modigliani (1884 - 1920) | Nu assis au collier, oil on canvas (Auction record for the artist in Europe)
Executed in 1917-18
91.5 x 59.7 cm
Provenance (Supplemented by The Value):

• Léopold Zborowski, Paris
• Jonas Netter, Paris
• Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris
• Alex. Reid & Lefevre Ltd., Glasgow and De Hauke & Co., Inc., New York (acquired jointly from the above in 1928) 
• Galerie L’Art Moderne, Lucerne
• Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 20 June 1935, lot 43 (consigned by the above)
• Etienne Bignou, Paris (acquired from the above sale)
• Alex. Reid & Lefevre Ltd., London 
• Mrs S. Kaye, London (acquired from the above on 29 April 1945)
• Alex. Reid & Lefevre Ltd., London (acquired from the above on 5 May 1949)
• Mr and Mrs Ralph F. Colin (acquired from the above on 8 June 1949)
• Christie’s, New York, Important Modern Works of Art from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Ralph F. Colin, 10 May 1995, lot 23 (consigned by the estate of the above; sold: US$12,430,000)
• Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Estimate upon request (Expected to fetch in the range of £45 million)
Hammer Price: £41,500,000
Sold: £48,235,000

Modigliani’s life has long embodied the myth of the brilliant, doomed artist. Born in Livorno in 1884 to an Italian Jewish family whose fortunes had collapsed, he was plagued by illness from childhood, yet his passion for art emerged early. During a feverish delirium with typhoid, he raved about seeing the Old Masters in Florence; once he recovered, his mother fulfilled her promise to take him there.

At 21, Modigliani moved to Paris and entered the avant-garde world of Montparnasse. A formative encounter with Constantin Brâncuși led him to sculpture, where he created female heads and caryatids for an unrealised “Temple of Beauty”. Drawing on African art, Cubism, and Renaissance and Mannerist painting, he developed the elongated faces and necks, tilted heads, and almond-shaped, often pupil-less eyes that became his hallmarks.

Stone dust aggravated his tuberculosis, forcing him to abandon sculpture around 1914. Returning to painting, he approached the female figure with new eyes, and it was in the nude that his challenge to convention became most radical. Rather than life studies or figures from myth, his nudes present contemporary women in simple interiors, rendered with striking directness and sensuality.

Despite Modigliani’s fame today, he spent most of his life in poverty. His only solo exhibition, held in Paris in 1917, caused such a scandal that police reportedly ordered the nudes in the gallery window to be removed for indecency. Already weakened by illness and worn down by lack of recognition, he increasingly turned to alcohol and drugs. He died in 1920, aged just 35, leaving behind a brief oeuvre of around three hundred works.

Amedeo Modigliani

Modigliani painted only around 30 to 35 nudes, now among the most coveted works of 20th‑century art. They include Nu couché, sold at Christie’s New York in 2015 for US$170 million to Chinese collector Liu Yiqian, which remains the auction record for the artist.

Nu assis au collier belongs to the celebrated series of nudes that Modigliani created under the patronage of the Polish dealer Léopold Zborowski, who paid the artist a modest daily allowance, provided models and materials, and even made room for him to work in his own apartment.

In this work, the sitter's pose knowingly recalls the Venus pudica of classical antiquity, while the coral necklace is reminiscent of those worn in the Italian Renaissance portraits. With her elongated form and averted gaze, his anonymous sitter feels at once classical and deeply intimate – she lifts one hand to her necklace, while the other rests between her legs in a gesture that is protective and provocative. Her nudity is self‑possessed and unapologetic, presented without the veil of myth or allegory. 

Nu couché, Sold: US$170,405,000, Christie's, 2015 | Now in the collection of Shanghai's Long Museum

The sitter's pose recalls Botecelli's Birth of Venus

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Lot 16 | Gustav Klimt (1862 - 1918) | Bildnis Gertrud Loew (Gertha Felsőványi) (Portrait of Gertrud Loew (Gertha Felsőványi)), oil on canvas
Executed in 1902
149.5 x 44.2 cm
Provenance (Supplemented by The Value):

• Dr Anton Loew, Vienna (commissioned from the artist in 1902)
• Sophie Loew, Vienna (wife of the above; acquired by inheritance from the above in 1907)
• Gertha Baruch von Felsőványi (née Loew), Vienna (acquired from the above by 1918)
• Gustav Ucicky, Vienna (acquired circa 1941)
• Ursula Ucicky, Vienna (acquired by inheritance from the above in 1961)
• Klimt Foundation, Vienna (acquired as a gift from the above in 2013)
• Klimt Foundation and The Heirs of Gertha Felsőványi (ownership settlement agreed between the two parties in 2014)
• Sotheby’s, London, 24 June 2015, lot 26 (consigned by the above; sold: £24,789,000)
• Acquired from the above sale by the present owner 

Estimate: £20,000,000 - 30,000,000
Hammer Price: £31,000,000
Sold: £36,160,000

By the early 20th century, Klimt was one of Europe’s most in-demand portraitists and the leading figure of the Vienna Secession. His work, threaded with barely veiled references to desire and the unconscious, scandalized the conservative art establishment but captivated Vienna’s elite – especially its Jewish and bourgeois families, who lined up to commission him and paid far higher fees than his contemporaries.

Portrait of Gertrud Loew portrays the 19-year-old daughter of Dr Anton Loew, a celebrated physician and important Secession patron whose private clinic treated the composer Gustav Mahler, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Klimt himself. The portrait is thought to have been commissioned by Gertrud’s mother, possibly as both a birthday gift for her husband and a marker of Gertrud’s recent engagement.

The financial security such commissions provided gave Klimt latitude to experiment. As in many of his most important portraits, he meets the basic demands of likeness and flattery while clearly pursuing a modern, highly personal aesthetic. 

The pale, near-monochrome palette wraps Gertrud in diaphanous whites and muted tones, lending the image a gentle, poetic softness associated with youth and purity. The strikingly narrow vertical format and flattened decorative field behind her recall Japanese woodblock prints, which had fascinated European artists since the late 19th century.

Wendy Lin won the lot for her client, paddle 34

Gertrud Loew (Gertha Felsőványi), the sitter in the present portrait

Klimt’s society portraits have long been trophy works for serious collectors, with very few remaining in private hands. Only six examples have come to auction since 2000, including Portrait of Ria Munk III, which Lewis acquired at Christie’s London in 2010:
 

• Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer | Sold: US$236,360,000, Sotheby's New York, 2025 (Second-most expensive painting sold at auction; auction record for the artist)
• Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II | Sold: US$87,936,000, Christie's New York, 2006 
• Lady with a Fan | Sold: £85,305,800, Sotheby's London, 2023 (Auction record for a work of art sold in Europe)
• Portrait of Gertrud Loew (the present lot) | Sold: £36,160,000, Sotheby's London, 2026
• Portrait of Fräulein Lieser | Sold: €38,500,000, im Kinsky, 2024
• Portrait of Ria Munk III | Sold: £18,801,250, Christie's London, 2010
   

Portrait of Gertrud Loew remained with the Loew family until 1939, when Gertrud was forced to flee Nazi-occupied Austria. Around 1941, the painting was acquired by the Austrian film director Gustav Ucicky, widely believed to have been one of Klimt’s illegitimate sons, and later passed to his widow, Ursula Ucicky, who went on to establish the Klimt Foundation in Vienna.

In 2013, Gertrud Loew’s heirs initiated restitution proceedings against the foundation. A settlement followed, and in 2015 the portrait was consigned to Sotheby’s London, where Lewis bought it for £24.8 million. Since then, it has been on long-term loan at the Neue Galerie in New York.

Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer | Sold: US$236,360,000, Sotheby's New York, 2025

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Lot 9 | Lucian Freud (1922 - 2011) | Sleeping by the Lion Carpet, oil on canvas
Executed in 1995-96
228 x 120.6 cm
Provenance:

• Acquavella Galleries, New York
• Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1996

Estimate: £25,000,000 - 35,000,000
Hammer Price: £25,000,000
Sold: £29,260,000

A titan of post-war British art and grandson of Sigmund Freud, Lucian Freud believed in painting the “inner world” of his sitters. Rather than idealised bodies, his portraits offer a frank scrutiny of the human form and an unflinching emotional depth, rendered in thick impasto with forensically observed detail.

Freud approached painting with near-monastic discipline. He worked slowly and intensely, requiring exhausting sittings that could stretch for hours and continue over many months. He painted almost exclusively people he knew well – friends, family, lovers – once saying that professional models had “grown another skin, because they’ve been looked at so much”.

The sitter here is Sue Tilley, a London benefits supervisor who became one of Freud’s most important subjects. Introduced to him in 1992 by performance artist Leigh Bowery, she was then 35, working in a job centre and moonlighting as a nightclub cashier. Though she initially felt like an unlikely candidate, her reliability, audacity, and voluptuous form made her an ideal model.

In Sleeping by the Lion Carpet, Freud treats Tilley’s body almost as a sculpture. Every fold of flesh, blemish, and freckle is articulated with thick, gravelly impasto, giving real weight and three-dimensional form to her reclining figure. Seen up close, her torso reads almost like a landscape: a terrain of rising and falling flesh, mottled with shifting purples, reds, and flesh tones against the cool blue ground of the lion carpet.

Lucian Freud

Sue Tilley and Sleeping by the Lion Carpet

Freud painted four monumental paintings of Sue Tilley:
 

• Benefits Supervisor Resting (1994) | Sold: US$56,165,000, Christie's New York, 2015
• Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (1995-96) | Sold: £29,260,000, Sotheby's London, 2026
• Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) | Sold: US$33,641,000, Christie's New York, 2013
• Evening in the Studio (1993) | Sold: around US$2.4 million, Sotheby's New York, 1999

Among them, Lewis also reportedly owned Evening in the Studio, while Benefits Supervisor Sleeping sold at Christie’s New York in 2013 for US$33.64 million, setting an auction record for a living artist at the time.

At £29.26 million (US$38.8 million), Sleeping by the Lion Carpet ranks as the third-highest auction price ever achieved for Freud. The artist’s overall record stands at US$86.3 million for Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau), sold from the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) | Sold: US$33,641,000, Christie's New York, 2013

Evening in the Studio (1993) | Sold: around US$2.4 million, Sotheby's New York, 1999

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Lot 5 | Edgar Degas (1834 - 1917) | Petite danseuse de quatorze ans, bronze with muslin skirt and satin hair ribbon on a wooden base
Conceived in wax circa 1879-81 and cast in bronze from 1922
Height: 101.3 cm
Provenance (Supplemented by The Value):

• Émile Peyonat, Saône et Loire
• Claude Glassey, Geneva
• Private Collection, Europe (acquired from the above in 1964)
• Sotheby’s, London, 27 June 2000, lot 3 (consigned by the above)
• Private Collection (acquired from the above sale)
• Sotheby’s, London, 24 June 2015, lot 14 (consigned by the above; sold: £15,829,000)
• Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Estimate: £18,000,000 - 25,000,000
Hammer Price: £21,400,000
Sold: £25,120,000

Edgar Degas’s most ambitious and important sculpture, Petite danseuse de quatorze ans, depicts a young student at the Paris Opéra Ballet – one of the so‑called “little rats” who had so fascinated the Impressionist artist. Where the stage offered idealised ballerinas, Degas was drawn to the reality behind the spectacle: the girls’ daily discipline, physical strain, and precarious social position. 

In late 19th‑century Paris, many of these dancers came from poverty and were often viewed as objects of patronage and desire for wealthy male subscribers. When the wax model was first shown at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1881, audiences were shocked by its realism and by the ambiguous status of its subject. Some critics went so far as to denounce the sculpture as vulgar, and Degas never again exhibited his sculptures publicly.

After the artist’s death in 1917, the original wax Little Dancer was found in his studio, and his heirs commissioned a foundry to cast a bronze edition of roughly twenty‑eight examples. The present work belongs to this posthumous series, which has since become central to Degas’s reputation as a sculptor and stands today as one of the defining images of the ballerina in Western art.

Anne Bass, the late Texas patron and collector, owned another bronze cast of Petite danseuse de quatorze ans, which set a record for Degas when it sold for around US$41.6 million at Christie’s New York in 2022.

With a price of £25.1 million (US$33.3 million), the present work now ranks as the third-most expensive Degas ever sold at auction. It was acquired by a telephone bidder with paddle numbered 90, who also secured the sale’s Picasso, Buste de femme, for £23.9 million (US$31.6 million).

Lot 3 | Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973) | Buste de femme, oil on paper laid down on canvas
Executed on 10 May 1938
78.7 x 60.5 cm
Provenance:

• Vladimir Golschmann, St. Louis (acquired by 1958 and until at least 1971)
• Private Collection
• Acquired from the above by the present owner in June 1996

Estimate: £12,000,000 - 18,000,000
Hammer Price: £20,300,000
Sold: £23,855,000

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British billionaire Joe Lewis

Last year, Sotheby’s London set a European record for a single‑owner auction when the Pauline Karpidas collection realised £73.2 million (US$100 million) in its evening sale. That figure has now been eclipsed by the Joe Lewis sale, which brought in £296 million (US$392.6 million) and established a new benchmark for a collection in Europe.

A self‑made billionaire born in London’s East End in 1937, 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. 

Lewis is now best known to the wider public 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, propelling Spurs into the ninth most valuable football team in the world.

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. 

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Other Highlight Lots:

Lot 21 | Amedeo Modigliani (1884 - 1920) | Homme à la pipe (Le Notaire de Nice), oil on canvas
Executed in 1918-19
92.1 x 54.3 cm
Provenance:

• Roger Dutilleul, Paris (acquired circa 1919)
• Geneviève and Jean Masurel, Paris and Roubaix (acquired by inheritance from the above circa 1956) 
• Acquired from the above by the present owner

Estimate: £12,000,000 - 18,000,000
Hammer Price: £19,800,000
Sold: £23,280,000

Lot 7 | Egon Schiele (1890 - 1918) | Danaë, oil and metallic paint on canvas
Executed in 1909
80.5 x 125.7 cm
Provenance:

• Herr Kohn, Vienna (probably until 1928) 
• Karl Rob (Robitsek) (Rob-Verlag), Vienna (acquired by 1928) 
• Siegfried and Gesche Poppe, Hamburg (acquired by 1961) 
• Achim Moeller Fine Art, New York (acquired from the above circa 1985)
• Private Collection (acquired from the above) 
• Acquired from the above by the present owner

Estimate: £12,000,000 - 18,000,000
Hammer Price: £15,150,000
Sold: £17,932,500

Lot 19 | Francis Bacon (1909 - 1992) | Two Studies for Self-Portrait, oil on canvas, in two parts
Executed in 1977
Each: 35.5 x 30.5 cm
Provenance:

• Private Collection, Switzerland (acquired directly from the artist)
• Sotheby’s, London, 2 December 1993, lot 32 (consigned by the above)
• Private Collection, United Kingdom (acquired from the above sale)
• Sotheby’s, London, 10 February 2015, lot 18 (consigned by the above)
• Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Estimate: £8,000,000 - 12,000,000
Hammer Price: £7,100,000
Sold: £8,675,000

Lot 2 | René Magritte (1898 - 1967) | La Belle promenade, gouache on paper (Auction record for a work on paper by the artist)
Executed in 1965
41.8 x 30 cm
Provenance:

• Pierre Scheidweiler, Brussels (acquired from the artist on 8 April 1965)
• Private Collection, Brussels
• Christie’s, London, 29 November 1993, lot 40 (consigned by the above) 
• Private Collection, Europe (acquired from the above sale) 
• Christie’s, London, 24 June 2014, lot 48 (consigned by the above)
• Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Estimate: £3,000,000 - 4,000,000
Hammer Price: £13,500,000
Sold: £16,035,000

Lot 1 | Gustave Caillebotte (1848 - 1894) | Portrait de Paul Hugot, oil on canvas
Executed in 1878
216 x 96.8 cm
Provenance:

• Paul Hugot (acquired as a gift from the artist) 
• Private Collection (acquired by descent from the above until circa 1951) 
• Paris, Palais Galliera, 6 December 1966, lot 90
• Wildenstein & Co., Inc., New York (acquired from the above sale)
• Mr and Mrs Joseph E. Levine, New York (acquired from the above in April 1972)
• Sotheby’s, London, 29 November 1994, lot 24 (consigned by the estate of the above)
• Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Estimate: £3,500,000 - 4,500,000
Hammer Price: £8,500,000
Sold: £10,285,000

Lot 12 | Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973) | Baigneuses, sirènes, femme nue et minotaure, Ripolin, gouache, pen and India ink on board | Sold to an Asian collector
Executed in March 1937
22.4 x 26.5 cm
Provenance:

• Estate of the artist 
• Private Collection, Europe (acquired by descent from the above) 
• Christie’s, New York, 10 July 2020, lot 65 (consigned by the above)
• Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Estimate: £3,500,000 - 4,500,000
Hammer Price: £5,700,000
Sold: £7,044,000

Lot 8 | Max Beckmann (1884 - 1950) | Artisten, oil on canvas
Executed in 1948
165.5 x 88.6 cm
Provenance:

• Buchholz Gallery (Curt Valentin), New York (on consignment from the artist)
• Morton D. May, Saint Louis (acquired from the above on 5 July 1950) 
• Saint Louis Art Museum (acquired from the above on 21 December 1973)
• Marlborough Fine Art, London (acquired from the above in March 1974) 
• Saul P. Steinberg, New York (acquired from the above in July 1978)
• Christie’s, New York, 18 May 1981, lot 65 (consigned by the above)
• Private Collection (acquired from the above sale) 
• Christie's, London, 3 April 1989, lot 39 (consigned by the above)
• The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid (acquired from the above sale)
• Sotheby’s, London, 24 June 2002, lot 19 (consigned by the above)
• Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Estimate: £2,000,000 - 3,000,000
Hammer Price: £5,000,000
Sold: £6,190,000

Lot 18 | Lucian Freud (1922 - 2011) | Woman in a Grey Sweater, oil on canvas | Sold to an Asian collector
Executed in 1987-88
55.9 x 45.7 cm
Provenance:

• Saatchi Collection, London (acquired directly from the artist in 1989)
• Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1997

Estimate: £3,000,000 - 4,000,000
Hammer Price: £3,900,000
Sold: £4,848,000

Lot 20 | Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973) | Angel Fernández de Soto, oil on canvas | Sold to an Asian collector
Executed circa 1899
61.6 x 51.4 cm
Provenance:

• Mr and Mrs Augusto Palanza, Buenos Aires (acquired by 1954) 
• Galeria Witcomb, Buenos Aires, 3 September 1963 (consigned by the above)
• Alejandro Leonescu, Buenos Aires and Barcelona (acquired from the above sale) 
• Private Collection, Barcelona (acquired by descent from the above) 
• Sotheby’s, New York, 11 November 1987, lot 39 (consigned by the above)
• Gallery Suzuki, Tokyo (acquired from the above sale) 
• Private Collection (acquired from the above in 1989) 
• Christie’s, New York, 16 November 2016, lot 15b (consigned by the above)
• Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Estimate: £1,500,000 - 2,000,000
Hammer Price: £3,000,000
Sold: £3,750,000

Lot 17 | Chaïm Soutine (1893 - 1943) | Portrait du garçon en bleu, oil on canvas 
Executed circa 1928
76.5 x 57.8 cm
Provenance:

• Marcellin and Madeleine Castaing, Paris (acquired from the artist)
• Mr and Mrs Lloyd Bruce Wescott, Clinton, New Jersey (acquired by 1935)
• Mr and Mrs Ralph F. Colin (acquired from the above on 27 June 1945)
• Christie’s, New York, Important Modern Works of Art from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Ralph F. Colin, 10 May 1995, lot 43 (consigned by the estate of the above)
• Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Estimate: £1,800,000 - 2,500,000
Hammer Price: £1,850,000
Sold: £2,347,000

Lot 14 | Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 - 1901) | À Armenonville, en cabinet particulier, peinture à l'essence on board
Executed in 1899
67 x 52 cm
Provenance:

• Georges Menier (1880-1933), Paris
• Private Collection (acquired by descent from the above in 1933)
• Galerie Paul Rosenberg, Paris (acquired in 1935; probably from the above)
• Hugh Willoughby, London
• Captain Stanley W. Sykes, Cambridge
• Arthur Tooth & Sons, Ltd., London (acquired from the above on 20 December 1955)
• Louis and Evelyn Franck, Switzerland (acquired from the above on 21 December 1955)
• Sotheby’s, New York, 5 November 2015, lot 13 (consigned by the above)
• Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Estimate: £1,500,000 - 2,500,000
Hammer Price: £1,550,000
Sold: £1,981,000

Lot 22 | Kees van Dongen (1877 - 1968) | La Dame en noir, oil on canvas
Executed circa 1910-11
100.4 x 81.7 cm
Provenance:

• Galerie Kahnweiler, Paris (acquired from the artist circa October 1910)
• Galerie Alfred Flechtheim, Dusseldorf (until 1922)
• Galerie Paul Pétridès, Paris (acquired before 1978)
• Private Collection, Paris
• Sotheby’s, New York, 9 May 1995, lot 71 (consigned by the above)
• Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Estimate: £1,200,000 - 1,800,000
Hammer Price: £1,100,000
Sold: £1,408,000

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Auction Details:

Auction House: Sotheby's London
Sale: Masterpieces from the Lewis Collection
Date: 24 June 2026
Number of Lots: 25
Sold: 24
Unsold: 1
Sale Rate: 96%
Sale Total: £296,315,500