Christie's holds its Modern British and Irish Art Evening Sale at 8 King Street on Wednesday 21 October 2026, the week after Frieze.
Christie’s holds its Modern British and Irish Art Evening Sale at Christie’s King Street in St James’s on Wednesday 21 October 2026, a week after Frieze.
Houses that made their money on French pictures long treated Modern British and Irish art as a domestic sideline. Christie’s, trading from King Street since 1823, gave it a department and an evening session of its own.
That department handles Hepworth, Nicholson, Bacon, Freud and the postwar figurative painters. Over thirty years it has built an international market for a national school.
An evening sale differs from a day sale. Its thirty or forty lots are chosen because a name is attached and a price is expected, and the catalogue is written to make the case. What does not make the evening goes into the day sale that follows.
With Frieze a week past, King Street gives the room to home-grown painters. The catalogue and public view are announced closer to the date.
The saleroom is older than almost everything it sells that night. The department’s earliest painters were born roughly a century after Christie’s took the lease.