Beatles Painting Made Between Tokyo Performances Sells for $1.7 M. at Christie’s

The Beatles are best known for their iconic albums, and not necessarily for their visual art. But a painting made and signed by all four members of the band was sold at auction at Christie’s recently seems sure to help change that.

The work, titled Images of a Woman on Paper (1966), sold for $1.7 million with fees last week, nearly tripling its high estimate of $600,000.

The untitled acrylic and watercolor painting was made collaboratively by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison when they were stuck inside the Presidential Suite of the Hilton Hotel in Tokyo for 100 hours between June 29 to July 3, 1966. Japanese authorities decided that was the safest place to keep the band in between their five concert performances at Budo Kan Hall.

Visitors dropped by the grand hotel room. Some came bearing gifts, including high-quality art materials the musicians would use for this painting.

The two-day process of producing the work, photographed by Robert Whitaker, shows the four musicians sitting in four chairs around a table. A table lamp was used to weight down the paper, leaving behind a round circle in the center of the piece.

All four members of the band had some artistic experience previously. Lennon, for his part, attended art school for three years and published two books of writing with “lightning-fast caricatures.”

According to Whitaker, the four “never discussed what they were painting” and the image “evolved naturally.”

While Whitaker captured images of the band creating other art pieces made in that Tokyo hotel room in 1966, a lot essay from Christie’s said that “Images Of A Woman is the only known substantial piece of art made by the four Beatles in their years together – an extraordinary and unique item that has the best of provenance.”

The work was initially given away for free to the president of the official Beatles Fan Club in Japan, Tetsusaburo Shimoyama. In 1989, it was purchased by record store owner Takao Nishino. In 2012, Nishino consigned it for sale at Philip Weiss Auctions, and the Atlantic reported that he had, for some years, stored the piece under a bed. The Christie’s sale was done with Tracks Ltd. UK, a Beatles memorabilia dealer.