LONDON.- A storied Francis Bacon self-portrait—painted in 1972 in the shadow of devastating personal loss—leads an extraordinary quartet of paintings from The Lewis Collection, set to headline Sotheby’s Modern & Contemporary sales in London. Two career-defining portraits by Lucian Freud, and Leon Kossoff’s Children’s Swimming Pool—widely considered the artist’s masterpiece—complete the group.

Together, these paintings capture the School of London at its height and the zenith of each artist’s career— raw, psychologically charged, and profoundly human. Assembled over decades by Joe Lewis and his daughter Vivienne, among the movement’s greatest champions, each of these museum-quality works holds a central place in the story of postwar painting. These artists’ unflinching focus on the human figure laid the foundations for figurative painting today, influencing a generation of artists worldwide—from Jenny Saville and Tracey Emin, to Cecily Brown and Hurvin Anderson.

The four works will be on public view at the Breuer Building in New York from 17 through 19 February—marking a return to a city that has long embraced these artists. In 1948, the Museum of Modern Art first introduced Bacon to American audiences, praising the artist’s “savage and obsessive intensity”; and it was a New Yorker—the dealer William Acquavella—whom Lucian Freud credited with transforming the trajectory of his career. For Kossoff, the exhibition offers New Yorkers the first opportunity to see what is widely considered his finest achievement.

The group will return to London for a public exhibition beginning 26 February, ahead of its presentation in the Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction on 4 March.

“These four works together chart the full arc of the School of London. Dating from four consecutive decades, they represent the zenith of each artist’s practice, all confronting the body in its vulnerability, its pain, its pity, and its compromised pleasures. Bacon’s self-portrait concentrates psychological violence and formal invention into a single, devastating image of the self. Freud’s two works reveal the closeness, intimacy, and trust that existed between artist and sitter, turning paint, brush, and canvas into something like human clay, moulding character in a way that makes it palpably present. Their attention to humanity couldn’t be complete without Kossoff’s superlative depiction of a fragile, everyday scene. More than anything, this group of works speaks to their ability to capture in paint the very essence of what it means to be human.” -- TOM EDDISON, CO-HEAD OF CONTEMPORARY ART, SOTHEBY’S LONDON

The School of London was not a movement in the conventional sense; it was rather a small group of free- spirited London-based artists who resolutely pursued their own separate but related visions. Fully, almost obsessively, engaged with the world and people around them, they created paintings that were far removed from the tide of abstraction, minimalism and conceptualism that dominated American and other European art in the postwar period. Together, with their thickly laden brushes and endlessly tumultuous lives, these London artists up-ended tradition and created a completely new path forward for figurative art.

Soho was the social and psychological crucible of this milieu, and Francis Bacon was its gravitational centre. Every day Bacon would drink at the French House, Wheeler’s Restaurant, and above all the Colony Room Club, a social magnet that drew in artists of disparate ages and stylistic impulses. Bacon and Freud reportedly saw each other every day for twenty-five years after meeting in the mid-1940s, but also Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews and others.

The personalities animating the group were as uncompromising as the paintings themselves. Bacon was flamboyant and ferociously intelligent—cruelly funny, obsessively drawn to gambling and excess, cultivating chaos as a means of control. His minuscule South Kensington studio was a theatre of chance in which paint-smeared photographs, torn magazines, dust, and debris conspired in the act of creation. Following his death in 1992, a team of archeologists did a painstaking, two-year excavation of the studio to document and catalogue the conditions under which his work was made. Freud, by contrast, approached painting with monastic discipline. He worked slowly and obsessively, demanding exhaustive sittings from friends, lovers, and family. Models were subjected to prolonged scrutiny—sometimes nodding off under the weight of his gaze, only to be repositioned and resumed. Kossoff occupied a quieter register, though no less intense. His models were close friends and family. He described drawing as a process of discovery—“finding out what something really looks like”, returning obsessively to particular places in his neighbourhood over years, sometimes decades, as London rebuilt itself after the war: high streets, railway bridges, his local pool.

A GLIMPSE INSIDE THE COLLECTION

Francis Bacon, Self-Portrait, 1972. Estimate: £8,000,000–12,000,000

“…He was never more brilliant, more incisive or more ferocious when it came to depicting himself. In this he helped revive a genre, and Bacon’s Self-Portraits can now be seen as among the most pictorially inventive and psychologically revealing portraits of the Twentieth Century.” — MICHAEL PEPPIATT

1972 was a difficult year for Francis Bacon. Struggling to cope following the death of his partner George Dyer, he obsessively painted himself again and again. In that one year alone—described by historian Martin Harrison as ‘Bacon’s most prolific year for small self-portraits’—Bacon produced no fewer than twelve self-portraits on this scale. Of those, though, ‘none is more incisively painted than this painting’ (Harrison).

By February 1972, Bacon’s masochism and self-destructive behaviour was spiraling out of control and one night his doctor, Paul Brass, received an urgent call to the studio to reset his eye following a brawl with a lover. “I said you’re going to have to see a plastic surgeon. He said ‘Absolutely not—you can stitch me up now.’ So we lay him on the table in his studio. I offered him a local anaesthetic but he refused. He was so drunk I don’t think he felt anything.”

Brass had previously supported Bacon in a drugs trial in 1968. In a jealous rage, George Dyer had planted cannabis in the couple’s home, inside an African statue that he claimed had been given to him by the Kray twins, and called the police. Speaking in Bacon’s defence, Brass testified that Bacon’s bad asthma meant he could never have taken cannabis without becoming very ill.

Grateful for this, and for the face-saving stitches administered in his studio, when Bacon later came into Brass’s surgery for a checkup in late 1972, he left behind a paper bag. Inside, was this painting.

In the years since, the portrait has had a long and illustrious exhibition history, cementing its status as one of Bacon’s most celebrated works. First shown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1975, it was more recently included in Francis Bacon: Human Presence at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2024. The only 1972 self-portrait that has ever come to auction, this work was previously sold at Sotheby’s in 1994 by Paul Brass, the doctor to whom Bacon had gifted it.

Lucian Freud, Blond Girl on a Bed, 1987. Estimate: £6,000,000–8,000,000

“He asked me to model for him and I agreed. At first I was a bit nervous—I had never stripped off like that before—but I soon got used to it.” — SOPHIE DE STEMPEL, MODEL FOR BLOND GIRL ON A BED, 1981

Among all the subjects he explored, it is ultimately the portraits and the nudes that define Freud’s greatness, and of all his nudes, this work stands proud. Here, Freud takes the venerable tradition of the reclining nude and places himself in an illustrious lineage alongside the forbears he so admired—among them Titian, Velázquez, Manet, Ingres and Rodin. But, at the same time, he does with that tradition something entirely of his own.

This is not, in fact, a ‘nude’; it is, as Freud called it, a ‘naked painting’—a painting in which we keenly feel the model’s self-consciousness, and in which the raw imperfections that are so central to Freud’s sense of beauty are fully evident. Blonde Girl on a Bed represents the archetype of a Lucian Freud painting: thick, heavily worked paint, prolonged sittings, and a forensic attention to flesh, weight and gravity.
Sophie de Stempel, who the painting depicts, first met Freud in a Soho pub when she was just 19 and starting out as an art student. He was drawn to her visible discomfort, approvingly describing her as “a very bad model.” Freud’s sitters endured long, physically demanding sessions that could stretch over months. His working method was famously exacting; he painted standing up, palette in hand, cigarette hovering dangerously close to the canvas, leaning repeatedly towards the surface as he worked. He examined his sitters’ bodies so forensically that de Stempel felt as if “each of my toes was having its portrait painted.”

Freud was constantly concerned that his models might abandon the process, and drew on charm and conversation to keep them engaged. These skills proved so effective with Sophie that she came to model for him on and off for over eight years and he, in turn, became a major influence on her own painting. Across eight major portraits of de Stempel during the 1980s, Freud achieved some of the most probing and psychologically resonant nudes of his later career.

Blond Girl on a Bed was acquired from the Saatchi Collection in 1997 and since its execution has been exhibited in museums across the world including the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Reina Sofia in Madrid. Other works depicting de Stempel are in the permanent collections of some of the world’s leading museums, including Tate, London.

Lucian Freud, A Young Painter, 1957-58. Estimate: £4,000,000–6,000,000

“Under Bacon’s influence, [Freud] stops drawing entirely and begins to loosen up his paintwork. He incorporates chance and risk, he smears and displaces the face’s fixed features, he utilises all the viscosity and latent energy of oil paint applied by the brush” — SEBASTIAN SMEE, THE ART OF RIVALRY: FOUR FRIENDSHIPS, BETRAYALS & BREAKTHROUGHS IN MODERN ART

This portrait of the artist Ken Brazier represents a crucial artistic breakthrough for Lucian Freud. It was the moment the linear precision of his early portraits gave way to a broader, more tactile handling, signalling his growing confidence and intensified psychological presence.

At this moment, Freud’s marriage to Caroline Blackwood was disintegrating. Amid the influence of Francis Bacon and the bohemian energy of Soho, Freud began to experiment with a new way of painting. Now standing at the easel, he abandoned his neat sable brushes, adopting instead brushes made with coarse hog’s-hair. With this, the precision of his earlier works started to give way to a looser, more expressive style. At the same time, his meticulous—almost obsessive—approach to paint, and to its application, remained as steadfast as ever.

Freud was intrigued by Bacon’s idea of “packing a lot of things into one single brushstroke… The idea of paint having that power was something which made me feel I ought to get to know it in a different way.”

Whether depicting aristocrats or gamblers, Freud captured the rich tapestry of post-war bohemian London. His choice of sitters during these years was rarely accidental: consciously or not, he gravitated toward individuals whose personal struggles mirrored his own. Ken Brazier had had a particularly difficult upbringing and the older artist took it upon himself to make a better life for him, securing him a place at Slade School of Fine Art in 1958 and later a teaching position at Norwich School of Art. “I liked him and never asked myself why”, Freud said. “He was a friend and in a bad way. He was desperate but he was interesting.”

A Young Painter has been exhibited at major institutions worldwide, including the National Portrait Gallery, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC. Formerly part of the Saatchi collection, the work has not, however, been seen in public since 2012.

Leon Kossoff, Children’s Swimming Pool, 11 O’Clock Saturday Morning, August 1969, 1969. Estimate: £600,000–800,000

“London, like the paint I use, seems to be in my bloodstream.” — LEON KOSSOFF

Children’s Swimming Pool, 11 O’clock Saturday Morning is the finest in a celebrated series of five major paintings, executed between 1969 and 1972, depicting Willesden public swimming pool. Three of the four others reside in institutional collections in the UK. His scenes of urban leisure recall those of the great Modern painters, evoking Georges Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières and Paul Cézanne’s Les Grandes Baigneuses.

At once psychologically intimate and atmospherically expansive, the painting exemplifies Kossoff’s ability to elevate the everyday into the realm of epic modern painting. Here he depicts the swimming pool near his north London home, where he would take his children for swimming lessons. For Kossoff, the experience of the pool was like sitting at the centre of an orchestra. “I was very interested in how the pool changed during the summer months and how at different times of day the changing of the light and rise and fall of the changing of the volume of sound seemed to correspond with changes in myself.”

Leon Kossoff has been described as one of the greatest British artists of his time, known for his highly gestural impasto paintings and his expressive drawings in charcoal, pastel, and graphite. His hometown of London was a recurring subject of his work, in which he returned to familiar sites again and again to record the changing face of the city. This work belongs to a crucial phase in Kossoff’s practice, when his vision of London shifted away from the dark drama of bomb sites and building excavations toward the fragile beauty of lived, everyday scenes.