“Where you gonna swim with the riches that you found?” Oasis asked in All Around the World. Maybe in the art market, buying a portrait of Noel and Liam Gallagher at the height of their fame for a possible £2m.
Sotheby’s has announced that a 1996 painting of the brothers by Elizabeth Peyton is to be part of its June contemporary art auction in London.
It was based on a photograph of the brothers taken by Stefan De Batselier in 1995, the year Noel is said to have hit his brother with a cricket bat.
You could feel the “quiet tension” between them in Peyton’s portrait, said Antonia Gardner, a specialist at Sotheby’s. “It feels so prescient, knowing now how it all ended up.”
She added: “It is a press image … They’ve got their arms around each other, but you can feel that sort of slight tension within it.”
You also could not fail to be struck by the prettiness of the pair in the portrait, Gardner said.
“Peyton always slightly feminises these big male, macho pop stars,” Gardner said. “You’ve got bright red lips, almost soft rosy cheeks, aquiline noses … Peyton certainly does make her subjects look very, very beautiful.”
That year, 1996, was huge for Oasis, playing what were thought at the time to be the biggest live concerts ever staged in the UK. An estimated 2.5 million people applied for tickets at Knebworth Park and 500,000 people were at the two spectacles, considered a defining moment in the history of Britpop.
This summer Oasis are back, putting aside years of mutual loathing to reunite for concerts in the UK and Ireland 16 years after they split.
Like Knebworth, many more people tried to get tickets than were available, with a reported 14 million fans missing out on the 1.4m tickets.
It showed the band’s enduring importance, Gardner said. “It feels like this is just the most perfect moment for this painting to come up again. It has come full circle.”
Ticket prices for 2025 were considerably higher than the £22.50 charged at Knebworth, and the sale was mired in rows over “dynamic” ticket pricing that meant some fans paid more than £350 for a £150 ticket.
This year’s reunion is predicted to be the most popular and profitable in British music history, with fans expected to spend more than £1bn on tickets, accommodation, food, drink, outfits and merchandise.
Gardner, Sotheby’s head of contemporary evening sales, said Peyton was one of the most important painters to emerge in the 1990s.
While the Young British Artists dominated the UK art scene, Peyton was an American artist looking in at the birth of Cool Britannia. She is famous for her paintings of musicians including John Lennon, Keith Richards and Kurt Cobain.
One of the four paintings she made of the Gallagher brothers is in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, while one of Liam sold for $4.1m in November last year – an auction record for a Peyton work.
The painting being sold in London on 25 June has an estimate of £1.5m to £2m.
