Joe Lewis collection made £296.3m with fees at Sotheby’s London, a UK record

Sotheby’s sold works from the collection of the financier Joe Lewis in London on 24 June 2026 for £296.3m with fees, the most valuable single-owner collection ever sold in the UK, according to The Art Newspaper.

Lewis is a billionaire financier and former owner of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. A pre-sale preview from Elite Traveler gave the London auction dates as 24 and 25 June.

The hammer total was £249.3m against a pre-sale estimate of £150m to £200m, which excluded fees.

A 1917 Modigliani nude was the top lot, selling on a single bid at £41.5m hammer, or £48.2m with fees. Lewis had bought it in 1995 for US$12.4m.

Klimt’s portrait of Gertrud Loew made £31m hammer against a top estimate of £30m. Lucian Freud’s ‘Sleeping by the Lion Carpet’ sold at its £25m low estimate, or £29.3m with fees.

The first lot, Gustave Caillebotte’s portrait of Paul Hugot, hammered at £8.5m against a top estimate of £4.5m, or £10.3m with fees. René Magritte’s ‘La Belle promenade’, a work on paper estimated at £3m to £4m, made £13.5m hammer, or £16m with fees.

At the Lewis family’s request no work carried a guarantee, so every lot faced the room without a price floor set by the house. Collectors from Asia bid on half of the 25 lots and accounted for around a third of the total, according to The Art Newspaper.

The evening, scheduled for one hour, ran for nearly two. A Picasso the Lewis family bought at Christie’s in 2020 for £6.4m with fees returned £7m with fees, against an estimate of £3.5m to £4.5m.