Art & Antiques: Sotheby's €500m sales break records 

The Lewis Collection and Modern and Contemporary Art auctions generate the highest total for a season in Europe

Oliver Barker, chairman of Sotheby's Europe, conducting the sale of the Lewis Collection.

Cool art set temperatures soaring further in the middle of a scorching London heatwave. All sorts of records were broken at Sotheby’s night-to-remember sales, courtesy of the Lewis Collection and Modern and Contemporary Art Auctions.

Four auctions realised £420,488,006 (€487,177,483), the highest total for any season of sales ever staged in Europe. Sotheby’s sales were led by Masterpieces from the Lewis Collection, where 25 paintings made £296 million (€342.95 million). 

Amedeo Modigliani 'Seated Nude with Necklace' sold for €55.84 million.

Modigliani’s Seated Nude with Necklace sold for £48.2 million (€55.84 million) and led the nine works which sold for over £10 million (€11.59 million). Among them was art by Picasso, Klimt, Egon Schiele, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon.

Competitive and deliberate bidding from around the world lasted for nearly two hours. This was the most valuable single-owner sale in London’s auction history. Bidders came from 45 countries. Collectors from Asia accounted for over one-third of the sale’s value.

The collection was assembled over more than two decades by 89-year-old former Tottenham Hotspur owner Joe Lewis, noted for his significant impact on the art market through his extensive collection and strategic transactions, and his daughter Vivienne.

The Lewis collecting philosophy is centred on assembling museum-quality masterpieces. Lewis sold his stake in Christie’s, where he was the largest single shareholder, to Francois Pinault in 1998 after a share price surge. Committed to the avant-garde painters of today, the Lewis family intend to continue their collecting journey into the future.

Fuelled by stellar works by Monet, Rothko, Hockney and Kandinsky, the Modern and Contemporary auction, which followed the Lewis auction, brought in another £97 million (€112.38 million). Bidding was again deliberate, and 40 lots took two hours to sell. 

Claude Monet's 'Water Lilies' sold for €47.27 million.

The top lot was Monet’s Nymphéas (Water Lilies), which made £40.8 million (€47.27 million) to become the most valuable Impressionist work sold at auction in Europe in over a decade.

The combined total of £393.4m (€455.79m ) for the two sales set a new single-night auction record for Europe. The next day, the Modern auction, including art from the Lewis Collection, totalled £17.7 m (€20.51m), and the Contemporary auction added another £9.3m (€10.77m).

The extraordinary Lewis Collection traced a line from Viennese portraiture to the painters from the School of London, with modern figurative painting at its core. The overall total of 47 works sold from the collection came to £306.6m (€355.23m). 

Gustav Klimt's 'Portrait of Gertrud Loew' sold for €41.83 million.

Together with the £35.8m (€41.48m ) for the four School of London works sold at Sotheby’s in March, led by Francis Bacon’s 1972 self-portrait, the combined total for the Lewis Collection sold at Sotheby’s this year is £342.4m (€396.7m).

These sales continued an emerging trend where growth in the global art market is concentrated at the top. Single-owner collections of museum-quality works continue to be the market driver.