Peter Simon Collection Sets £107.5M Christie’s Record

The Peter Simon Collection made £107,508,800 at Christie’s London on October 14, setting the house’s record for a single-owner collection in the city. Yet the exceptional sell-through rate came from an entirely guaranteed evening sale, while weaker results elsewhere in London show that one collection’s success is not evidence of a broad market recovery.

 
 

The £107.5 Million Record, Properly Separated

Christie’s announced the record on October 15, the day after the sale. Its official results release gives the Peter Simon evening auction a £107,508,800 total, including buyer’s premium, with 98 percent of lots sold and 99 percent sold by value. The record belongs to that dedicated evening auction, not to Christie’s simultaneous mixed-owner sale and not yet to every format in which Simon’s property was offered.

Christie’s London sale	Date	Total	Sold by lot
Peter Simon evening	Oct. 14	£107.509m	98%
Mixed-owner evening	Oct. 14	£111.095m	85%
Peter Simon day	Oct. 15	£10.237m	97%

Adding only the two completed Peter Simon live sales produces £117,745,600. That is 46.6 percent of the £252,780,296 running total Christie’s reported on October 19 for its five completed London live auctions. The Simon evening auction alone came within £3.6 million of the house’s much broader 20th/21st Century evening sale.

The distinction matters because the dedicated online sale was still unresolved when Christie’s issued its October 19 update. The live-sale figure is therefore a clean subtotal, not a final valuation of everything consigned from the collection.

 

Christie’s Auction Rooms (1808), designed and etched by Thomas Rowlandson and Auguste Charles Pugin; aquatint by John Bluck. The Metropolitan Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication; cropped.

 
 

A Collection Premium, but Also a Guaranteed Floor

Simon, the founder of Monsoon and Accessorize, assembled the collection over roughly four decades. Christie’s described an eye shaped by textiles, travel, color and composition; the catalogue moved from European Modernism and the St Ives School to postwar American and contemporary art. That coherence gave bidders a named provenance rather than an assortment of unrelated consignments.

The risk structure was just as important. The Art Newspaper reported that all 41 evening lots carried guarantees: 11 from Christie’s and the remainder from third parties. One Frank Auerbach failed to sell. A guarantee protects the consignor with a minimum price; Christie’s assumes direct loss risk on a house guarantee and shares that risk when a third party supplies an irrevocable bid, so the arrangement alone does not show demand above the floor.

There was real competition. Christie’s says 43 percent of the lots beat their high estimates. But the guarantee coverage means the 98 percent sell-through rate cannot be treated as an unassisted referendum on the market. The stronger conclusion is narrower: buyers competed aggressively for selected works carrying both established names and the Peter Simon provenance.

The top five results—Francis Bacon’s Figure in Movement, Piet Mondrian’s Composition A, with Double Line and Yellow, Joan Miró’s Peinture (Les amants — Adam et Eve), Liubov Popova’s Painterly Architectonic and Hurvin Anderson’s Last House—made £48.797 million together. That is 45.4 percent of the evening total. Bacon’s £17.185 million lead price was substantial without dominating the collection; Francis Bacon’s portrait painting provides wider context for the artist’s treatment of the figure.

 
 

Five Artist Records Show Where Bidders Stretched

Popova’s 1918 Painterly Architectonic was the sharpest contest. It sold for £7.64 million against a £1.8 million low estimate after nearly eight minutes of bidding, exceeding her previous record. Bridget Riley’s Streak 2 reached £5.214 million; Portia Zvavahera’s This is where I travelled [3] made £307,200; David Bomberg’s San Miguel, Toledo, Afternoon reached £3.262 million; and Barbara Hepworth’s The Hands and the Arm set a record for one of her paintings at £537,600.

These were not interchangeable trophy lots. Popova’s work is unusually scarce, Riley’s painting had a long exhibition history, and Anderson’s Last House had recently appeared in his Tate Britain retrospective before selling for £5.702 million, almost three times its low estimate. The pattern favors rarity, institutional visibility and documented history. It supports a provenance premium, but it does not isolate how much of each price came from Simon’s ownership rather than the work itself.

The collection’s success also sets a useful benchmark for the forthcoming Blaquier-Arrieta collection auction. That separate New York sale will test whether another named collection can attract the same concentration of demand in a different city and season.

Painterly Architectonic (1918) by Lyubov Popova; this is a different 1918 work from the painting on board sold from the Peter Simon Collection. Photograph by Carl Ha via Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

 
 

The Wider London Week Was Selective, Not Uniform

Christie’s mixed-owner evening sale totaled £111.095 million, but only 85 percent of its 46 offered lots sold. Sotheby’s October 15 contemporary evening auction was smaller and softer: 28 of 34 offered lots sold, an 82 percent rate, and about 30 percent hammered above their low estimates.

A numerical error in the October 20 Observer roundup obscures that comparison. It gives Sotheby’s 2026 total as £47.6 million. The Art Newspaper’s sale report separates £36.9 million at hammer from £45.9 million with fees and identifies £47.6 million as the total from October 2025. Sotheby’s own auction page dates the sale to October 15 and lists 34 results. The supported 2026 comparison is therefore £45.9 million after fees, not £47.6 million.

Phillips presents the opposite kind of selectivity: a compressed 20-lot evening auction in which every listed lot sold. Summing the house’s published results gives £14,836,750, matching its rounded £14.8 million announcement. The official Phillips record also corrects the Observer’s £4.7 million figure for Gerhard Richter’s Mathis: Phillips lists £5.839 million as the sold price. The lower number may represent hammer, but it is not the final price on the house’s result page.

Put together, the week does not show indiscriminate confidence. Christie’s record collection was fully covered by guarantees; Sotheby’s left six lots unsold; and Phillips achieved a white-glove result with just 20 lots in its final sale list. Capital was available, but it clustered around scarcity, fresh provenance, institutional validation and carefully managed estimates.

Sotheby’s New Bond Street premises in London. Photograph by Claus Hoppe via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.5.

 
 

The Record Is Real; the Recovery Is Not Yet Broad

Christie’s results establish the £107,508,800 London record and £117,745,600 completed live subtotal. The Art Newspaper’s lot-level report establishes that every evening lot was guaranteed, limiting what the sell-through rate alone can prove. Official Phillips results put Mathis at £5.839 million, while the supported Sotheby’s total is £45.9 million rather than the Observer’s £47.6 million. Christie’s online Peter Simon sale was not final in the October 19 update, leaving the collection’s all-format total open.