Polish painter Tamara de Lempicka’s La Belle Rafaëla (1927) led Sotheby’s modern and contemporary evening sale in London, selling for £7.47 million ($10.05 million). The total sales came to £62.43 million ($83.97 million), on the lower side of its pre-sale estimate of £55.3 million–£81.2 million ($75.4 million–$110.48 million).
Painted in 1927, La Belle Rafaëla depicts a reclining nude, partially draped with a scarlet red cloth, in Lempicka’s elegant, stylized form. The painting last appeared at auction in 1985 at Sotheby’s, where it fetched just £178,278 ($231,090 at the time). “A painting of this importance—that speaks to us nearly 100 years on—only comes very rarely to auction,” said Thomas Boyd-Bowman, head of evening sales for Impressionist & modern art at Sotheby’s London. This sale follows de Lempicka’s first U.S. retrospective at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, which closed in February 2025.
Women artists accounted for 30% of the sales total, significantly more than many auctions. Another lot within the top five was Jenny Saville’s Juncture (1994), another nude portrait depicting a bare back, which sold for £5.4 million ($7.26 million). Saville’s Mirror (2011–12), a large-scale drawing of spectral reclining nude forms, smashed its presale high estimate of £1.2 million ($1.63 million), selling for £2.11 million ($2.87 million). The sale set a new record for a drawing by Saville at auction.
British portraitist Elizabeth Peyton’s painting of Liam and Noel Gallagher, the Oasis bandmates, sold for £1.99 million ($2.67 million). This was a sixfold increase from its 2011 result and the second highest price paid for the artist’s work at auction.
Several blue-chip names also performed strongly. Pablo Picasso’s Nu assis dans un fauteuil (1964–65) from the artist’s final decade sold for £7.11 million ($9.57 million, making it the second top lot of the night. Meanwhile, Claude Monet’s Aux Petites-Dalles (1884) brought in £5.65 million ($7.6 million), nearly tripling its previous auction result from 2000. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work on paper, Untitled (Indian Head) (1981), sold for £6.62 million ($8.91 million). A group of six works by Roy Lichtenstein from the artist’s personal collection, including Purist Still Life with Pitcher (1975), realized a combined £5.98 million ($8.05 million).
Eight works were passed over during the night, including anticipated works by Egon Schiele, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Barbara Hepworth.
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