Peter Blake valuation
Godfather of British Pop, and the man who assembled the crowd on the Sgt. Pepper sleeve.
Peter Blake was born in Dartford in 1932, studied at the Royal College alongside the generation that made British Pop, and had already established a manner built on badges, wrestlers, pin-ups and fairground signwriting before Pop had a name.
What a work by Peter Blake is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Peter Blake was born in Dartford in 1932, studied at the Royal College alongside the generation that made British Pop, and had already established a manner built on badges, wrestlers, pin-ups and fairground signwriting before Pop had a name. In 1967 he and Jann Haworth designed the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which remains the most reproduced image of his career and was made for a flat fee. He later helped found the Brotherhood of Ruralists in the West Country, returned to London, and has continued to make collage, print and assemblage into his nineties. He was knighted in 2002.
Blake is one of the most heavily editioned artists working in Britain, and the print output runs from small, early, genuinely scarce editions to very large recent screenprint and giclee editions published in the hundreds. The two are not comparable, and separating them is the whole of a valuation: publisher, date, edition size, and whether the sheet is signed and numbered in pencil. Paintings, collages and the boxed assemblages are unique and sit far above the prints. Condition of paper, fading and light damage are the usual issues.
Editions, and the album sleeve problem
Sixty years of printmaking through a long list of publishers means the same image frequently exists in more than one edition: different sizes, different colourways, different papers, editions running from tiny to very large, and later re-editions of earlier images. A photograph of the image alone often cannot tell one from another. What does is the pencil inscription, the edition size, the publisher's details and the sheet dimensions before any trimming.
The other thing that arrives under this name is not art at all in the market's sense. Signed Sgt. Pepper sleeves, signed books and signed posters are memorabilia, sold in a different room to different buyers on the strength of the signature rather than the object. They can be worth having. They are not editions, they are not valued like editions, and the first useful step is establishing which of the two you are holding.
Young Contemporaries, Babe Rainbow and the sleeves
He was first named with British Pop in the Young Contemporaries exhibition of 1961, alongside David Hockney and R. B. Kitaj, and won the junior John Moores prize that year with Self Portrait with Badges. Ken Russell's film Pop Goes the Easel brought him to television in 1962. Robert Fraser represented him from 1963 and gave him his first solo show in 1965, and from 1969 Leslie Waddington's gallery took over. On the Balcony, of 1955 to 1957, looks like a collage and is painted throughout.
Babe Rainbow, a screenprint on tinplate published by Dodo Editions in 1968, was made in an edition of 10,000 and sold cheaply, which is why it turns up so often. Besides Sgt. Pepper, which won a Grammy, he designed sleeves for the Band Aid single, Paul Weller's Stanley Road, The Who's Face Dances and, 38 years later, WHO, as well as Oasis's Stop the Clocks and the 2012 Brit Award statuette. The Tate gave him a retrospective in 1983, and Tate Liverpool another in 2007.
Best auction results
- Little Lady Luck £704,750
- Painted in 1965 · London · 22 November 2017
- Publicly reported
- Sold in a Modern British and Irish art sale, and the artist's highest auction result.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
