Terry O'Neill valuation
Photographed the famous when they were still relaxed about it, from the Beatles to Faye Dunaway by the pool.
Terry O'Neill was born in Romford in 1938 and wanted to be a jazz drummer; a job in the photographic unit at Heathrow led to a shot of a sleeping Rab Butler that a newspaper bought, and within a couple of years he was photographing the Beatles and the Rolling Stones at the start of their careers.
What a work by Terry O'Neill 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
Terry O'Neill was born in Romford in 1938 and wanted to be a jazz drummer; a job in the photographic unit at Heathrow led to a shot of a sleeping Rab Butler that a newspaper bought, and within a couple of years he was photographing the Beatles and the Rolling Stones at the start of their careers. Six decades of portraits followed — Sinatra on the Boardwalk with his minders, David Bowie, Elton John, Amy Winehouse, and Faye Dunaway by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel the morning after her Academy Award, which is the single most requested image. He was made a CBE and died in 2019.
The market is almost entirely in editioned photographic prints, and this is a name where the paperwork does the work: images exist across several sizes and edition types, with signed lifetime prints, later prints and posthumous editions issued by the estate under an established programme. The certificate identifying the image, size and edition should always be present. Some images were also released in co-signed editions. Print process varies between gelatin silver and later pigment prints and is worth recording accurately, since it is not always stated.
Dunaway at dawn, and the collections
The best-known picture, of Faye Dunaway beside the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel on 29 March 1977, the morning after she won the Academy Award for Network, with newspapers scattered around her and the statuette on the table, is one of a series taken that dawn. His photographs of Elton John were collected in the book Eltonography in 2008.
The National Portrait Gallery in London, which showed Terry O'Neill: Celebrity in 2003 and 2004, holds some eighty of his prints. For an owner, the print's size, edition, date of printing and signature, set out on its certificate, identify it, and prints signed in his lifetime are distinguished from those issued after his death.
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.
