London School Icons from the Lewis Collection Will Headline Sotheby’s March Sales

As the London auctions approach in March, we are beginning to learn more about the major consignments the top houses have secured for this sales cycle—an auction round that will once again test the market, which entered 2026 with renewed hope following the positive close of 2025. Sotheby’s announced today a major consignment of “London School” paintings, featuring museum-grade works by Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff. Behind this valuable trove is Joe Lewis, owner of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club and a longtime champion of the movement, who has often placed prime works from his collection with institutions around the world—but has never before publicly attached his name to any sale.

Leading this exceptional quartet is Francis Bacon’s 1972 self-portrait, painted in the shadow of devastating personal loss following the death of his lover George Dyer. That year was also one of Bacon’s most prolific, as the strongest creative urgency often emerges as a reaction to tragedy. The painting carries an exceptional emotional and psychological charge: Bacon depicts himself as utterly transformed by grief and sorrow, the scream becoming the entirety of the human figure. It reflects one of the darkest moments of his life, as his masochism and self-destructive behavior spiraled further out of control.

Coming to auction with an estimate of £8-12 million, the painting was first shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1975 and was most recently included in the widely praised major survey at the National Portrait Gallery in 2024, where it has since hung alongside the museum’s permanent displays. The only 1972 self-portrait by Bacon ever to come to auction, the work was previously hammered for £330,000 at Sotheby’s in 1994 by Paul Brass, the doctor to whom Bacon had gifted it after Brass assisted him through some of his most desperate nights. Notably, the painting arrives at auction on the heels of the success of Portrait of a Dwarf (1975), which sold at Sotheby’s London for £13.11 million (around $17.6 million), exceeding its high estimate.

At its core, this is precisely what defined the artists of the London School: a form of figuration under pressure, distorted by psychological and inner forces, confronting the body as something fragile, temporal and charged both emotionally and subconsciously.

Two of the remaining works are by the other central figure of the group, Lucian Freud, the grandson of Sigmund Freud, whose reflections on the disruptive forces of the subconscious appear to find full manifestation in the paintings of the movement—despite Lucian Freud’s consistent resistance to any direct psychoanalytic reading of his work.

Hitting the rostrum is one of Freud’s most commercially and critically prized subjects: the nude. Blond Girl on a Bed (1987) carries an estimate of £6-8 million and portrays Sophie de Stempel, one of Freud’s favored models, precisely because she was, in his words, “a very bad model,” awkward in the way of a young student. Drawing on the venerable tradition of the reclining nude—mirroring masters he deeply admired such as Titian, Velázquez, Manet, Ingres and Rodin—Freud defies here any move toward harmony or idealization. The result is what he described as a “naked painting,” one in which the viewer feels the model’s awkwardness and the full weight of physical, time-bound, flesh-limited existence. This is expressed through Freud’s signature thick brushwork and his forensic attention to the body’s gravity and mass. Underscoring its importance within his oeuvre, the canvas has been widely exhibited at major institutions worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Reina Sofía. Other depictions of de Stempel reside in permanent museum collections, including Tate. Lewis acquired the painting from the Saatchi Collection in 1997.

The other Freud tableau offered in the sale is an earlier work, A Young Painter (1957-58), portraying the artist Ken Brazier. The painting marks a crucial turning point in Freud’s practice: here he begins to abandon a more linear, academic approach in favor of a looser, more tactile handling of paint, intensifying the psychological presence of the sitter. Freud developed this expressive shift under the influence of Bacon and the bohemian energy of Soho, at roughly the same moment he was distancing himself from a more conventional bourgeois life as his marriage to Caroline Blackwood was disintegrating.

Born in Berlin to a wealthy, liberal, non-observant Jewish family, Freud moved to the U.K. in 1933 with his parents to escape the Nazis. He met Bacon in the mid-1940s through a mutual friend, the artist Graham Sutherland. From then on, they were extremely close for nearly a decade, meeting regularly in studios and Soho restaurants and bars, until the mid-1950s, when their relationship collapsed. Bacon was theatrical, extroverted and self-destructive, thriving in Soho’s nightlife; Freud grew increasingly private, disciplined and devoted to work.

In this sense, Brazier embodied the artistic milieu Freud wanted to immerse himself in at that stage of his life. As Freud later said, “He was desperate but he was interesting,” existing outside the bounds of British bourgeois respectability. With an estimate of £4-6 million, the painting boasts an extensive exhibition history, having been shown at the National Portrait Gallery, the Centre Pompidou, the Neue Nationalgalerie and the Hirshhorn Museum. Formerly part of the Saatchi Collection, from which Lewis acquired it, the work has remained publicly visible since 2012.

These two prime Freud works arrive at a moment when his market is robust and resilient—particularly for nudes and psychologically charged portraits—even as paintings of this caliber appear only rarely at auction. A possible comparable for the second painting could be Self-portrait Fragment (c. 1956), which sold at Christie’s London last October for £7,600,000 (this estimate appears in line with it, actually). This result followed the £11,810,000 Ria, Naked Portrait (2006-07), also sold at Christie’s the year before—a far more elaborate nude figure that could be used as a comparable for Lewis’s Blond Girl on a Bed (1987), despite the latter being much more historical. However, most recently in New York, Christie’s sold a similar-sized Naked Portrait in a Red Chair (1998-1999) for just its low estimate of $3,500,000, while The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer (2004-2005) fetched $14,435,000.

Last in the group, but no less significant, is Leon Kossoff’s Children’s Swimming Pool, 11 O’Clock Saturday Morning, August (1969), described as one of the finest works from a series of five major paintings executed between 1969 and 1972 depicting the Willesden public swimming pool. The painting was last seen publicly in 1996-1997 and belongs to a small, highly significant group of five swimming pool paintings, three of which are held in museum collections, including the Arts Council and Tate. The appearance of this work on the market offers collectors a rare opportunity to acquire a painting of clear museum caliber, belonging to a tightly held, institutionally validated body of work.

While Freud’s relationship with Bacon ultimately collapsed, his bond with Kossoff remained far more tightly knit. The two shared a deep commitment to drawing from life, to endurance-based working methods and to repeated sittings, regarding painting as a rigorous, forensic observation of flesh-bound existence and as a process accumulated over time. This painting, however, also reveals Kossoff’s distinctive ability to elevate the everyday into the realm of epic modern painting. Estimated at £600,000-£800,000, it aligns with recent market results.

The London School in the U.S.

Notably, this tightly curated group of “London School” works from Joe Lewis’s collection will debut at the Breuer in New York before appearing in the Modern & Contemporary Evening Sale in London on March 4—a trajectory that symbolically mirrors the historical reception of these artists.

“These are four masterpiece-quality works by their respective artists—truly museum-quality paintings,” Tom Eddison, Sotheby’s co-head of contemporary art in London, told Observer. “Presenting them in New York, at the Breuer, which itself is a former museum building, felt like an extraordinary opportunity to introduce these pictures and these artists ahead of their auction in London.”

As he explained, there is a long-standing and deeply engaged American audience for these artists, with a rich lineage of exhibitions and acquisitions by major museums across the U.S. “In their own time, these artists were resolutely figurative and forged their own paths, distinct from broader movements like Abstract Expressionism, Pop, or Minimalism. Yet they achieved remarkable international appeal very early on,” Eddison noted.

The London School was taken seriously in the U.S. before it was fully embraced in Britain, as American institutions and patrons proved more receptive than the British establishment, which remained cautious—and at times dismissive—of figurative painting during the height of modernism. The first acquisition of Francis Bacon’s work in America was a 1946 painting, which MoMA acquired in 1948. What’s particularly striking is that this happened before MoMA had acquired works by Pollock or Rothko. Bacon’s early representation at the Hanover Gallery in London, supported by Arthur Jeffress, who had strong American ties, helped foster transatlantic connections that were instrumental in building his reputation. Following the MoMA acquisition, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, his work was widely exhibited and collected in the U.S., including major presentations in Chicago and a landmark retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1963. As a result, Bacon’s presence in American collections and institutions has been firmly established.

Lucian Freud followed a similar trajectory, beginning with early exhibitions at Hanover Gallery and later Marlborough Gallery, which maintained a strong New York presence. Although Freud’s family background initially drew public attention, his artistic achievements quickly established him as a major figure in his own right. MoMA acquired his work in the 1950s, and American collectors engaged with his practice well before his first major U.S. museum exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in 1987. Still, a pivotal turning point came through his relationship with New York dealer William Acquavella, whom Freud himself credited with transforming the trajectory of his career. “Their agreement was made on a handshake—no paperwork—just trust,” Eddison said. “It became an extraordinary partnership, and Acquavella played a pivotal role in elevating Freud’s stature in America, introducing his work to a new level of institutional and collector recognition.”

Kossoff also developed significant institutional and gallery support in the U.S., despite his major American exhibitions emerging later than those of Bacon or Freud. By the 1980s, he was represented by L.A. Louver Gallery, and his work entered prominent museum collections in both California and New York, reinforcing his strong transatlantic presence. This institutional backing helped establish Kossoff as a major figure among American collectors and curators, even though his market visibility has remained comparatively limited, particularly at auction, where it is rare to see a painting of this quality come up.

At the same time, even as Bacon and Freud have been appearing more regularly at auction, works of this caliber remain exceptionally rare. “What we’re really excited about is the quality and freshness of these works. They have been exhibited in many of the most important exhibitions dedicated to these artists, not least over the past five years,” Eddison pointed out.

The sale also comes at a strategic moment following a series of recent high-caliber exhibitions of work by the artists: a major Lucian Freud show just opened at London’s National Portrait Gallery, where it is on view until May 4. This follows another extensive exhibition of Freud work at the National Gallery in D.C. in 2022, which later traveled to Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. Francis Bacon also had a major show at the London National Portrait Gallery in 2024, while a major comparative exhibition examining Bacon’s dialogue with Picasso and the human figure is set to open in September 2026 at the Albertina Museum in Vienna. Meanwhile, Kossoff had a recent show at Pallant House Gallery.

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