Joe Lewis, a British billionaire known for his success in currency trading, recently sold several artworks from his collection at a Sotheby’s auction in London. The sale happened on March 4, 2026 and drew attention from collectors around the world. Lewis, who owns Tottenham Hotspur football club through his family trust, has built a notable art collection over many years.
This auction brought him returns exceeding 3,500 percent on some pieces he had held for decades, according to Bloomberg. The works came from the School of London artists; a group focused on figurative painting after World War II. Buyers competed actively, pushing prices higher than expected in several cases.
The auction results
The evening sale at Sotheby’s included 53 lots and achieved a total of £131 million with fees, which was about $175 million. All items sold, making it a white-glove auction with no unsold pieces. Four works from Lewis’s collection made up a big part of the success, bringing in £35.8 million, or roughly $47.8 million as reported by The Art Newspaper.
These pieces had been in his hands for nearly 30 years, showing his long-term approach to collecting. One key painting was Francis Bacon’s self-portrait from 1972, created after the death of his partner. According to Sotheby’s official results, it sold for 16 million pounds with fees after starting at an estimate of £8 to £12 million. Two portraits by Lucian Freud also went under the hammer – one showing his muse and the other a painter friend – fetching £7.1 million .
The standout was Leon Kossoff’s 1969 work: Children’s Swimming Pool, 11 o’clock Saturday Morning, August. As per Bloomberg, it sparked a five-minute bidding war among 10 people and set a new record for the artist at £5.2 million hammer price, or higher with fees.
This painting came from Kossoff’s series on public pools, and its fresh appearance on the market after years in private hands helped drive the competition. The Lewis lots alone accounted for over a quarter of the night’s total, boosting the London art market’s start to the year. Reports from The Art Newspaper noted how the sale provided stability amid global uncertainties, with bids coming from 40 countries. Sotheby’s had previewed the works in New York before the London event, which likely built extra interest.
Joe Lewis’s path to art collecting
Lewis started his fortune in the 1970s through smart trades in foreign exchange, including a famous bet against the British pound in 1992 alongside George Soros. His company, Tavistock Group, now manages investments in various fields, and his net worth sits at a pretty $8.73 billion, per Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Over time, he turned some of that wealth toward art; often keeping pieces on his superyacht or lending them to museums without much public fanfare. This recent sale is his first major public offering from the collection. Though, notably, he has sold items before – like a David Hockney painting for $90.3 million in 2018, which set a record for a living artist at the time.
Lewis worked with his daughter Vivienne to assemble the School of London group, focusing on artists like Bacon, Freud, and Kossoff who captured everyday life and human forms in raw ways. Observer magazine reported that these works first debuted in New York before the auction and allowed art enthusiasts to trace the artists’ journeys to wider recognition.