This summer in London, Sotheby’s will stage a landmark exhibition and sale of masterpieces from the renowned Lewis Collection. Estimated in excess of £150m / $200m, this will be the most valuable single collection ever offered in London, bringing together some of the greatest achievements in modern figurative painting. Select highlights from the collection will be unveiled to the public at Sotheby’s headquarters in New York’s historic Breuer Building on 2 May, ahead of exhibition and sale in London in June.
Highlights on view in New York will include Gustav Klimt’s ethereal full-length society portrait Bildnis Gertrud Loew (Gertha Felsőványi) from 1902 (est. £20–£30m); Egon Schiele’s audacious early masterpiece Danaë, in which all of the artist’s nascent talent is crystalised (est. £12–18m); a major painting by Amedeo Modigliani – Homme à la pipe (Le notaire de Nice) – unseen for almost half a century (est. £12–18m), and Francis Bacon’s stark double self-portrait from 1977 (est. £8-12m), infused with the melancholia of a life blighted by tragedy.
GUSTAV KLIMT (1862–1918) Bildnis Gertrud Loew (Gertha Felsőványi) 1902 oil on canvas Estimate: £20–30 million ($27–40m)
Detail
GUSTAV KLIMT (1862–1918) Bildnis Gertrud Loew (Gertha Felsőványi) 1902 oil on canvas Estimate: £20–30 million ($27–40m)
On its first showing at the Wiener Secession’s Klimt exhibition in 1903, the great Viennese art critic, Ludwig von Hevesi, described Bildnis Gertrud Loew as ‘the most sweet-scented poetry the palette is able to create.’ Today, the allure of Klimt’s full-length society portraits remains undimmed. With the majority held in major museum collections, these coveted works seldom appear on the market. In the last quarter century, only five major portraits by the artist – including this work – have sold at auction, each one of which has exceeded its top estimate, often by multiple factors.* Further to being acquired by the Lewises, this painting has for years hung alongside other masterpieces by Klimt at New York’s famed Neue Galerie.
This captivating 1902 portrait depicts the ethereal figure of 19-yearold Gertrud Loew – a member of fin-de-siècle Viennese society, later known by her married name Gertha Felsőványi – wreathed in diaphanous folds of gossamer fabric. Commissioned by Gertrud’s father Dr Anton Loew, at the time one of the most celebrated physicians in Vienna, the painting was widely exhibited – to much acclaim – during the artist’s lifetime, both in Austria and Germany.
When the Nazis arrived in Vienna, Gertrud came under increasing pressure due to her Jewish ancestry, and in early 1939 reluctantly agreed to leave the city for exile in the United States, leaving the entire Felsöványi art collection behind. When Gertrud’s daughter, Maria, returned to Vienna after the war to reclaim her family’s property she discovered that it had all been sold, also under duress, by her mother’s friend. Initially untraceable by the Felsöványi family, Bildnis Gertrud Loew had in fact been acquired by Gustav Klimt’s son Gustav Ucicky, whose widow, Ursula, established the Klimt Foundation in Vienna in 2013. Thanks to her research, the full provenance and history of the work was unearthed, and the portrait was subsequently sold following a settlement between the Felsöványi heirs and the Klimt Foundation.
*In November 2025, another of Klimt’s celebrated portraits, Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer) (1914-16), sold for $236.4m at Sotheby’s New York, the second-highest price ever achieved for a work of art at auction. Similarly, in 2023, Sotheby’s London presented for sale Klimt’s Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan), which exceeded its estimate of £65m ($80m), selling for £85.3m ($108.4m), becoming the most valuable artwork – of any kind – ever sold in Europe.
EGON SCHIELE (1890–1918) Danaë 1909 oil on canvas Estimate: £12–18 million ($16–24m
Among the most important paintings by Egon Schiele ever to come to market and recently exhibited at the Neue Galerie in New York, Danaë is widely regarded as a key breakthrough work. Daring and strikingly modern, and painted when the artist was just nineteen, the painting marks the first full expression of Schiele’s extraordinary vision, heralding the revolutionary aesthetic he would develop over the next decade, until his untimely death at the age of 28.
The work’s jewel-like surface, stylised execution and geometric patterning reflect the opulence of the Jugenstil movement – which was at its peak at the time – while the daring composition pays homage to Schiele’s mentor, Gustav Klimt, who championed the young artist throughout his career and whose influence is evident in the ornamental richness and flattened planes in this painting.
Here Schiele imagines the mythological scene in which Zeus descends on Danaë in a shower of golden rain, its heaviness accentuated by the introduction of greens and blacks. Schiele’s extraordinary talent as a draughtsman is already fully evident in the sureness of line – especially around Danaë’s hand, shoulders and right arm – the preciseness of which contrasts sharply with the delicate washes that illuminate her face.
AMEDEO MODIGLIANI (1884–1920) Homme à la pipe (Le Notaire de Nice) 1918 oil on canvas Estimate: £12–18 million ($16–24m)
Unseen for nearly half a century, Homme à la pipe (Le notaire de Nice) ranks among the crowning achievements of Amedeo Modigliani’s late career. By the time he painted L’Homme à la pipe, Modigliani was in the final, and arguably finest, phase of his short life. In 1918, he and his companion Jeanne Hébuterne relocated to Nice, where his dealer Léopold Zborowski hoped the warmer climate might restore his failing health. The Mediterranean light softened his palette, though his compositional authority remained undiminished. Lacking his usual Montparnasse coterie, Modigliani turned to the locals – workers, farmers, apprentices – as his models, finding in their unadorned dignity a subject perfectly suited to his art.
For L’Homme à la pipe, he chose a mature man known as the Notary of Nice. The sitter wears a dark suit and black cap, his left hand raised to hold a pipe, his face rendered in Modigliani’s signature manner — long and stylised, with almond-shaped eyes that seem to look inward rather than outward. Behind him, warm tones of orange and beige evoke the light of the Côte d’Azur, their softness thrown into quiet relief by the dark mass of the figure. L’Homme à la pipe belongs to that last luminous burst of work – when his style was fully formed, his hand was sure, and his life was coming close to an end.
FRANCIS BACON (1909–1992) Two Studies for Self-Portrait 1977 oil on canvas Estimate: £8–12 million ($11–16m)
Francis Bacon’s self-portraits are widely viewed as the most revealing and ruthless of the artist’s works, prepared as he was to paint himself with a ferocity he rarely directed at others. Executed in 1977 at the height of his international acclaim, Two Studies for Self-Portrait captures an artist beset by inner turmoil. Following the suicide of his love George Dyer in 1971 – on the eve of his retrospective opening at the Grand Palais – Bacon launched into a period of production that would become the most emotionally fraught but ambitious of his career. Behind these works lies a decade of guilt, bereavement, and self-scrutiny, marked by the deaths of many of those closest to him – not only George Dyer, but also Peter Lacey. When asked in 1979 why he made so many self-portraits, Bacon explained: “people have been dying around me like flies and I’ve had nobody else to paint but myself.”
In these haunting, life-scale images, Bacon appears as a double death mask: pink and purple apparitions dissolving into encroaching darkness, mouths mangled, eyes sealed shut. Intriguingly, the left panel seems to echo the Self-Portrait with Injured Eye from 1972, in which Bacon’s battered eye socket is portrayed as brutally purple and swollen. (A similar work from The Lewis Collection, Francis Bacon’s searing 1972 Self-Portrait, sold in London in March 2026 for double its low estimate at £16m / $21.5m.) Exhibited widely across Europe and Asia during Bacon’s lifetime, this double-portrait – one of only a handful of self-portraits in this format – stands as one of the most powerful and intimate expressions of the artist’s late career.
GUSTAVE CAILLEBOTTE (1848–1894) Portrait de Paul Hugot 1879 oil on canvas Estimate: £3.5–4.5 million ($5–6m)
Within his celebrated oeuvre, it is the paintings featuring the human figure which capture most vividly Caillebotte’s unique – and at the times audacious – treatment of space, light and composition. In the last quarter century, only half a dozen major works of this kind have come to auction, making the appearance of this work – unseen on the market for over thirty years – a rare opportunity to see and acquire a work of such significance.
This monumental portrait of Caillebotte’s close friend, neighbour and patron Paul Hugot was a daringly ‘modern’ submission to the Fifth Impressionist Exhibition in 1880. Described by Armand Silvestre, a leading critic of the time, as ‘by far [Caillebotte’s] best piece’, the painting captures the unique synthesis of intimacy and rigour that is the hallmark of Caillebotte’s unique style, and which makes this one of the most celebrated male portraits of the Impressionist era.
Caillebotte’s financial status allowed him an artistic freedom not afforded to other members of the Impressionist group: unfettered by monetary need, he developed his own, unique, pictorial language – one in which an acute awareness of light and shadow blends with a meticulous eye for composition, gesture, proportion and character. Here every detail in this painting is brilliantly observed – from Hugot’s crisp waistcoat and top hat, to the letter, indicating erudition, tucked into his pocket. Hugot was a key supporter of Caillebotte’s work, amassing one of the largest collections of the artist’s works ever formed. In this magnificent portrait, Caillebotte pays full homage to the importance of a figure so central to both his professional and personal life. Portrait de Paul Hugot was exhibited at the recent Musée d’Orsay retrospective devoted to the artist.
LUCIAN FREUD (1922–2011) Woman in a Grey Sweater 1987-88 oil on canvas Estimate: £3–4 million ($4–5.5m)
Lucian Freud is widely regarded as one of the most significant figurative painters of the 20th century, painting the human figure with an unflinching, almost forensic intensity. In the manner so typical of his greatest works, the artist’s characteristic intensity of observation is here combined with immense intimacy to extraordinarily powerful effect.
Painted over several months in 1987 and 1988, Woman in a Grey Sweater is an intimate portrait of Susanna Chancellor. Susanna was just nineteen when she first met Freud, but they remained lifelong friends – Susanna acting as loyal confidante and muse, and – in later years – becoming one of the artist’s most significant models, his paintings of her characterised by an unparalleled warmth and liveliness.
Woman in a Grey Sweater was acquired from the Saatchi Collection in 1997 and since its execution has been exhibited in museums across the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tate Britain, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and Museo Nacional de Art Reina Sofia, Madrid.
CHAÏM SOUTINE (1893–1943) Portrait de garçon en bleu Circa 1928 oil on canvas Estimate: £1.8–2.5 million ($2.5–3.5m)
Born into extreme poverty in Belarus, Soutine has been described by art critic Waldemar Januszczak as “a painter of extraordinary invention and subtlety” and “one of art’s finest colourists.” He spent his creative years in Paris, and during the 1920s, alternated between capturing ‘portraits’ and still lifes on canvas. Although the figures he chose to paint – drawn from the working class – remain anonymous, their identities shine through, as in Portrait de garçon en bleu, a depiction of a young boy in his uniform. Soon after it was painted, the work entered into the historic collection of Marcellin & Madeleine Castaing, who were close friends with Soutine through the 1930s, financially supporting him after the death of his dealer in 1932. After his death, Soutine drew the admiration of artists such as Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, whose gestural brushwork can be traced back to Soutine’s remarkably dexterous touch.
Soutine’s reputation as the most squalid artist in history originates in the story of him going to the doctor to complain that his hearing was drastically impaired, only for the doctor to pull a nest of bedbugs from his ear.
PABLO PICASSO (1881–1973) Portrait de Dora Maar (Dora Maar à la coiffe) 1936 brush and ink, wash and pencil on paper Estimate: £600,000–800,000 ($800,000–1.1m)
Picasso met Dora Maar in early 1936 and was immediately enchanted by her beauty and intelligence. Although still married to Olga Khokhlova and involved with Marie-Thérèse Walter, he swiftly began a relationship with the Surrealist photographer. An artist in her own right, who spoke Picasso’s native Spanish, Maar shared his political concerns and became the embodiment of his emotional and intellectual anxieties awakened by the war in Spain and the World War which followed. The drawing was first owned by Maar, remaining in her collection until the sale of her estate in 1998.
