Christie's holds its Modern British and Irish Art Evening Sale at 8 King Street on Wednesday 21 October 2026, the week after Frieze.
Modern British and Irish art was for a long time treated as a domestic sideline by houses that made their money on French pictures, and Christie’s, trading from King Street since 1823, was among the first to give it a department and an evening session of its own. That department handles Hepworth, Nicholson, Bacon, Freud and the postwar figurative painters, and it has spent thirty years turning a national school into an international market.
An evening sale is a different object from a day sale. Thirty or forty lots are chosen for the session because a name is attached and a price is expected, the catalogue is written to make the case, and the room is filled with the people who set the market rather than those who follow it. What does not make the evening goes into the day sale that follows.
The 2026 sale is on Wednesday 21 October at 8 King Street, kept a clear week after Frieze so that it is not competing with the international week for the same attention. A start time is not yet published, and the catalogue and public view are announced in the weeks before. The saleroom itself is older than almost everything it will sell that night, since the department’s earliest painters were born a century after Christie’s took the lease.