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The Top Lots to Watch in the March London Sales

Blue-chip works by Moore, Bacon, Monet, Richter, Picasso and Magritte will test the resilience of the global art market after November’s multi-billion-dollar New York auctions.

Spring arrives in London with the annual Modern and Contemporary auctions, staged each March as one of the first major market tests of the year. And after November’s multi-billion-dollar New York auctions, expectations are elevated. 

With five works estimated above £5 million—by Monet, Bacon, Freud, Basquiat and Fontana—Sotheby’s is aiming to achieve £113-160.8 million across its March series, with the Evening Sale alone projected to generate £96.7-135.9 million. The centerpiece is a quartet of masterpieces from the Lewis Collection, described as one of the most important troves of School of London works to come to market in recent years.

Meanwhile, Christie’s 20th/21st Century Art Marquee Week is projected to bring £87-131 million, led by masterworks by Henry Moore and Wassily Kandinsky with estimates above £10 million. The lineup also features a 1980s photo-derived painting by Gerhard Richter with a high estimate of £9 million, alongside one of his “Abstraktes Bild” canvases from 1991 estimated at £4.5-6.5 million. Altogether, the evening sales are expected to generate £143-217 million, contributing to a broader Marquee Week total projected at £174-263 million.

What follows are the 10 lots that are expected to define the week’s results.

What to watch in London

Henry Moore's 'King and Queen'

Bacon’s 1972 self-portrait from the Lewis collection

Gerald Richter's 'Shober (Haybar)'

Claude Monet's 'Maison de Jardinier'

René Magritte's 'Les Grâces Naturelles'

Wasily Kandinsky's 'Le Ronde Rouge'

Barbara Hepworth's 'Three Obliques (Walk In)'

David Hockney's 'English Garden'

Pablo Picasso's 'Le Peintre et son modèle'

Paul Signac's 'Marseille. Le Port'

Henry Moore's 'King and Queen'

Christie's, 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale, March 5; Estimate: £10-15 million

Conceived by Moore between 1952-1953 and inspired by Egyptian art, this majestic bronze sculpture presents two stylized figures seated on a bench, their “Pan-like” heads lending them an uncanny, almost extraterrestrial presence, as if they had arrived from another time and space, at once deeply archaic and strikingly futuristic. Their bony, fossil-like forms recall Etruscan sculpture, and their ancestral, regal bearing carries something fierce and supernatural, like the spirit of ancient warriors or shamans. The unsettling yet compelling existential mystery they seem to embody, like ominous prophetic guardians or heralds bearing a fatal message, contributes to the sculpture’s enduring enigma, transforming this modern work into a monument to a historical moment marked by uncertainty, created in the shadow of postwar anxieties when humanity was once again confronting its fragility and fallibility. That psychological weight, as much as its formal authority, helps justify its £6-9 million estimate. King and Queen is the last cast in private hands from an edition of four, plus one artist’s copy, cast at the Galizia Foundry, London, in 1952-1953. Two subsequent bronzes were cast specifically for the collections of the Tate Gallery, London (1957), and the Henry Moore Foundation, Much Hadham (1985). 

Bacon’s 1972 self-portrait from the Lewis collection

Sotheby's, Modern and Contemporary Evening Auction, March 4; Estimate: £8-12 million

Francis Bacon’s 1972 self-portrait encapsulates the psychological torment and grief the artist was enduring at the time, emotions that gave rise to some of his most searing works. Painted in the immediate aftermath of the devastating loss of his lover, George Dyer, this canvas carries exceptional emotional force, reflecting one of the darkest periods of Bacon’s life, as his masochism and self-destructive impulses spiraled further out of control. Here, Bacon presents himself as radically transformed by grief. The scream appears to overtake the entire figure, dissolving identity into raw sensation. The human form becomes almost synonymous with anguish, capturing not only the pain of personal loss but also a broader existential anxiety shaped by the lingering trauma of postwar Europe and the persistent international tensions of the era. First exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1975, the painting was most recently included in the widely praised major survey at the National Portrait Gallery in 2024, where it hung alongside the museum’s permanent collection displays. The only 1972 self-portrait by Bacon ever to appear at auction, the work last sold at Sotheby’s in 1994, when it hammered for £330,000. It was purchased by Paul Brass, the doctor to whom Bacon had gifted the painting in gratitude for supporting him through some of his most desperate nights. Its return to auction comes amid renewed momentum for Bacon, following the major show at the National Portrait Gallery in London last year and the strong recent performance of Portrait of a Dwarf (1975), which sold at Sotheby’s London for £13.11 million, surpassing its high estimate and reaffirming demand for Bacon’s psychologically charged mid-1970s works.

Gerald Richter's 'Shober (Haybar)'

Christie's, 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale, March 5; Estimate: £6-9 million

Among the largest and most resolved of Richter’s 1980s landscapes, this work was one of four haybarn paintings made between 1983 and 1984 in the Bavarian Forest. The canvas reflects Richter’s sustained engagement with the rural terrain of West Germany, a setting that, in the divided cultural climate of the period, carried both personal and symbolic resonance. Hovering between image and erasure, it encapsulates the tension between the tradition of landscape in German romanticism and postwar skepticism. This work was among the first Richter paintings derived from photographs he had taken himself with a Fujifilm camera, a technical and conceptual shift that introduced a newly luminous palette of pastoral greens, saturated blues and terracotta reds into his practice. Formerly held in the collection of New York real estate developers Emily and Jerry Spiegel, who acquired it from Marian Goodman in 1985, the painting last sold at Christie’s New York in 2017 for $6,967,500 with buyer’s premium.

Claude Monet's 'Maison de Jardinier'

Sotheby's, Modern and Contemporary Evening Auction, March 4; Estimate: £6.5-8.5 million

Painted during one of the most transformative moments of Monet’s career, a 10-week sojourn immersed in the light and colors of the Italian Riviera in early 1884, the painting depicts the lush floral life of the celebrated garden of Francesco Moreno. It belongs to a small and significant group executed during this brief Italian interlude, now particularly rare on the market, as most other examples are held in major museum collections, including the Musée d’Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. The provenance is equally distinguished. The work was first acquired by John Singer Sargent and later passed through several notable American collections, among them Sarah Choate Sears's collection. The painting was last sold by Sotheby’s in London in February 2007, achieving $7,968,663 with premium against a $3.5 million high estimate. The sharp rise in valuation over the past decade underscores the enduring strength of demand for Monet, particularly at this level.

René Magritte's 'Les Grâces Naturelles'

Christie's, The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale, March 5;

Estimate: £6.5-9.5 million

This March marks the 25th edition of Christie’s landmark The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale, the only international auction devoted exclusively to Dada and Surrealism, launched by the auction house in 1989, well before broader market momentum gathered around the movement. Leading the sale is an enigmatic painting by René Magritte featuring one of his most recognizable motifs: the fantastical “leaf-bird,” a hybrid form suspended between states of being, captured at the moment of metamorphosis and fusion with nature. Returning to auction after 25 years in the same private collection, having been acquired from the Brussels-based Xavier Hufkens Gallery, the mysteriously vibrant canvas has been on long-term loan to the Magritte Museum in Brussels since its opening in 2009 through 2025. Featured in the artist’s catalogue raisonné and in Michel Draguet’s 2009 publication Magritte, son oeuvre, son musée, the work has appeared in major institutional surveys, including the landmark retrospective at SFMOMA in 2000 and the 2005 exhibition organized by BA-CA Kunstforum, which later traveled to Fondation Beyeler in Basel. According to Artprice, Magritte ranked fourth worldwide among the best-selling artists at auction in 2025, with 199 works changing hands for a combined total of $171.6 million. The sustained strength of his market follows the record set in 2024, when a 1954 version of L’Empire des lumières sold for $105 million at Sotheby’s. If the 100th anniversary of Surrealism fueled demand for the movement’s key figures, Magritte has clearly led the charge with his enigmatic visions, which continue to captivate the market’s imagination.

Wasily Kandinsky's 'Le Ronde Rouge'

Christie's, 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale, March 5; Estimate: £10.5-15.5 million

Painted in the spring of 1959 in his apartment on the Seine, this work translates pure musicality into color and line, a testament to the artist’s relentless creative drive to reinvent and expand the lyrical possibilities of abstraction even in the final phase of his life. A rigorous geometric structure blends fluidly with sinuous biomorphic elements through free-floating passages of color and expressive brushwork, evoking a dance of matter and energy in continuous metamorphosis, propelled by a powerful internal force that ultimately settles and crystallizes into this intriguing, almost alchemical composition. With a remarkably rich literature and exhibition history attesting to its significance, this masterpiece was last seen in public at The Courtauld Gallery in London, where it was on long-term loan from 2002 to 2018. It was then sold at Sotheby’s in November 2018 for $20,621,000, at which point it was acquired by the consignor.

Barbara Hepworth's 'Three Obliques (Walk In)'

Sotheby's, Modern and Contemporary Evening Auction, March 4; Estimate: £3.5-4.5 million

Sotheby’s is offering one of Barbara Hepworth’s most sophisticated explorations of form and space from the 1960s. Rising to nearly three meters in height, the bronze ranks among Hepworth’s most commanding works, marking a decisive evolution in her sculptural vocabulary at a crucial moment in her career. By this period, Hepworth had moved beyond the pierced, intimate carvings of her earlier decades toward increasingly architectural compositions, treating space not as void but as a living, tensile force. In this sculpture, mass and aperture engage in dynamic equilibrium, while the organic curvature of the form suggests both landscape and bodily presence, extending her lifelong dialogue between abstraction and nature. Its rarity further heightens its significance. The bronze was produced in an exceptionally small edition of just two, plus one artist’s cast, with another example held by University College Cardiff in Wales, installed outside the School of Music. The combination of monumental scale, spatial sophistication and extreme scarcity positions the work as a rare opportunity within Hepworth’s mature oeuvre. Widely published in the relevant literature on the artist’s work, the sculpture was acquired by the present owner for $1,472,000, with a 10 percent premium, at a Sotheby’s auction in New York in May 2006.

David Hockney's 'English Garden'

Sotheby's, Modern and Contemporary Evening Auction, March 4; Estimate: £2.5-3.5 million

Painted while teaching in Colorado, this canvas marks David Hockney’s first fully realized English landscape. Likely propelled by longing and nostalgia for the familiar terrain of home, it became foundational to his lifelong engagement with the genre that continues today in his most recent iPad drawings. A selection of 16 large-scale works from The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire, 2011 will also be offered by Sotheby’s in the morning sale, “The David Hockney Sale: The Arrival of Spring.” In this early, formative landscape, Hockney is already testing the boundaries of representation, pushing the genre toward a more atmospheric, subtly stylized abstraction. Rather than merely depicting a place, he opens the landscape to imagination and emotional evocation, expanding its possibilities beyond naturalistic description. Working from a photograph, Hockney constructed an imagined England, a stylized, halcyon vision of the sculpted topiary gardens at Haseley Court in Oxfordshire, the celebrated home of Nancy Lancaster. Captured by Horst P. Horst and first published in American Vogue, the photograph had already transformed horticulture into haute mise-en-scène. Distilling a romantic ideal of pastoral order, it allowed Hockney to render the garden not simply as a private refuge but as a cultural emblem, a symbol of British lifestyle and of a historically coded relationship with nature. The painting was shown at Kasmin Gallery in 1965 and at Galleria dell’Ariete in Milan in 1966, and later included in the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s 1970 Hockney survey. Acquired by the present owner for just £89,500 at a Sotheby’s auction in July 1977, the work reemerged in the exhibition catalogue of Hockney’s major 2025 retrospective at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, an institutional endorsement that has further reinforced the strength of the artist’s market at its current level.

Pablo Picasso's 'Le Peintre et son modèle'

Christie's, 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale, March 5; Estimate: £7-10 million

There is no marquee sale without a Picasso in one of the top spots; his is one of those stable blue-chip names the market never seems to tire of. The work coming to auction at Christie’s London this season centers on one of his most enduring subjects, a theme that runs throughout his career but became an obsession in the 1960s: the painter at his easel in the presence of a reclining nude model. The motif allowed him to engage in metalinguistic reflection on the artist’s role in representing reality, probing questions of gaze, style and perception while pushing painterly representation to its limits through looser, gestural brushstrokes and a palette of pastel tones. With an extensive exhibition history and literature, the painting was acquired by the present owner at a Christie’s New York auction in November 2022.

Paul Signac's 'Marseille. Le Port'

Sotheby's, Modern and Contemporary Evening Auction, March 4; Estimate: £4-6 million

Painted toward the end of his life, this Neo-Impressionist masterpiece stands as a luminous celebration of Paul Signac’s lifelong exploration of color and light and their interaction with the optics of perception. Featuring his signature mosaic-like marks, central to the technique that came to define Pointillism, the painting translates the shimmering interplay between sunlight and sea into a kaleidoscopic field of radiant hues, transforming the surface into an atmosphere of chromatic vibration. In the exhibition catalogue for Signac’s 2001 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Leighton described the work as “a culmination of many years of reflection, theorizing, and practice.” In his later paintings, color is no longer rigidly subordinate to theory but allowed to unfold with greater freedom, moving through subtle tonal gradations in a finely balanced synthesis of chromatic richness and emotional resonance. Featured in the artist’s catalogue raisonné by Françoise Cachin, the painting remained within Signac’s family for many years after its creation. It passed from the artist’s daughter, Ginette Signac, who gifted the work to Henri Cachin in 1968. The painting was last offered at auction at Christie’s in June 2015, when it sold within estimate for £3,666,500 to the present owner. Notably, in 2005 it realized just £650,000, underscoring the sustained growth in the artist’s market, momentum further reinforced by the recent exhibition at the National Gallery in London, coinciding with a Courtauld Institute show dedicated to Neo-Impressionism’s central figure, Georges Seurat.

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