LONDON—Sotheby's sold £117 million ($230 million) worth of art last night, the most it has ever made in a London sale of modern and Impressionist works, thanks largely to increased demand from Russian buyers, reports Bloomberg. The 76-lot auction had a presale estimate of £81-112 million; 67 lots, or 88 percent of the total, sold, up from 82 percent in last year's sale. Sotheby's would not say how many works went to Russian buyers, but said that 87 percent of the lots went to buyers from Europe and 13 percent to U.S. buyers, down from 21 percent last year.

Highlights of the sale included Franz Marc's Weidende Pferde III (Grazing Horses III) (1910), which sold for a artist record £12.3 million to Sotheby's Russia director Mikhail Kamensky, bidding on the phone for a client, and Alexej von Jawlensky's Schokko (Schokko With Wide-Brimmed Hat), which sold to an anonymous buyer for £9.4 million pounds, more than double the $8.3 it fetched at Sotheby's in New York in 2003.

"There was a lot of buying from Russians," said Alex Lachmann, a Cologne-based dealer in Russian art. "They have a lot of money, and now they want to buy important French impressionist and German expressionist pictures."