Peter Simon, the founder of the Monsoon clothing brand, is set to auction his extensive art collection at Christie’s London next week. The collection, comprising nearly 200 works by a range of prominent artists, is expected to fetch between £85 million and £130 million across several sales. It is being described as the highest-value single-owner sale to take place at the auction house in the capital.

The range of artists represented includes internationally recognized names such as Francis Bacon, Howard Hodgkin, Frank Auerbach, Piet Mondrian, Willem de Kooning, Joan Miró, Elsworth Kelly, Andy Warhol, Bridget Riley, and Pablo Picasso. In addition to these, the collection features notable mid-20th-century British artists like Barbara Hepworth, Winifred Nicholson, Ben Nicholson, Paul Nash, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, Ivon Hitchens, and Cedric Morris, alongside contemporary figures such as Cecily Brown, Hurvin Anderson, and Beatriz Milhazes.

Among the highlights available for bidding are two Francis Bacon works—*Figure in Movement* estimated at £14 million to £18 million and *Study for a Figure* estimated at £4 million to £6 million—and a Piet Mondrian piece estimated between £8 million and £12 million. Other works, like William Nicholson’s *Mushrooms on a Plate*, are expected to be more accessible, with estimates between £70,000 and £100,000.

Simon, 77, was born in Sri Lanka during a monsoon in 1949, before moving with his family to Ireland in his youth. His early life reportedly lacked artistic influences, but a turning point came when he visited the British Museum as a teenager. Before entering the fashion industry, he briefly worked selling frozen fish fingers. His breakthrough in fashion emerged from a stall on the Portobello Road market, where he initially sold Afghan-style coats. A subsequent trip to Rajasthan inspired him to focus on hand-block printing, an ancient textile craft, which led to the founding of Monsoon.

The Monsoon brand, launched in the early 1970s, became synonymous with vibrant, colorful fabrics and prints imported from India, eventually expanding across the British high street along with the accessory brand Accessorize. Actress Jane Seymour was one of the brand’s first models and also Simon’s partner for a time.

Simon's collecting career began in earnest in the mid-1990s after exposure to contemporary art at the Serpentine Gallery in London. A chance encounter at a dinner party led him to visit the gallery’s 1994 exhibition *Here and Now: British Painters at the Serpentine Gallery from 1970 to the Present,* where he was particularly impressed by Howard Hodgkin and Francis Bacon. A subsequent introduction to art dealer Ivor Braka marked the start of his collecting journey, with his first purchase being a small seascape by Alfred Wallis.

Despite auctioning his collection, Simon has expressed intentions to continue collecting, noting he regrets not acquiring a significant work by David Hockney. The upcoming sales mark a milestone in the trajectory of a collector who transitioned from fashion entrepreneur to serious art patron over the course of several decades.