Elizabeth Peyton’s Liam + Noel (Gallagher), one of her most significant portraits of the Oasis brothers, sold on the low part of the estimate at Sotheby’s most recent Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction in London. The work, carrying an estimate of £1.5–2 million, was among the highest ever placed on the artist at auction. With fees, the total came to 1,992,000 GBP.
Painted in 1996, the portrait belongs to a defining moment in Peyton’s career, coinciding with Oasis’s ascent as Britpop’s most incendiary force. It captures the Gallaghers at their peak—just after their record-breaking Knebworth performances, where demand outstripped capacity by staggering margins. Peyton’s rendering, however, resists spectacle. Instead, it distils the brothers into an almost mythic stillness, their closeness both tender and charged with the tensions that would later fracture their partnership.
The painting is one of four dual portraits Peyton made of the pair, with another held in SFMOMA’s permanent collection. A solo depiction of Liam set Peyton’s auction record last November, selling for $4.1 million—a testament to the enduring pull of her music-infused iconography.
Peyton sidesteps the tabloid spectacle of the Gallaghers’ combustibility, opting instead for a hush that feels almost subversive. Drawn from Stefan De Batselier’s staged promotional image, the painting dissolves performative swagger, revealing the brothers in an uncharacteristic lapse of guardedness. Liam’s weight against Noel’s shoulder, their near-identical features blurred by Peyton’s translucent strokes—it’s an alchemy of oppositions. Here, celebrity frays at the edges, and the myth of invulnerable laddishness unravels into something quietly, unmistakably human.
Critic Jon Savage once noted Peyton’s ability to navigate “the space between public persona and private self,” a dynamic central to this portrait. By 1996, Oasis’s internal rifts were becoming tabloid fodder. Yet, Peyton sidesteps drama, opting instead for something more elusive—an image that acknowledges the fractures beneath the surface while preserving the brothers’ shared magnetism.
The double portrait has long served as a vessel for exploring relational dynamics, from Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait to David Hockney’s depictions of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. Peyton’s contribution to this tradition diverges from Warhol’s detached repetitions; hers is an art of intimacy, where reverence and realism collide.
Within Peyton’s broader pantheon—Kurt Cobain, Bowie, Napoleon—the Gallaghers occupy a distinct space. They embody a cultural flashpoint, a moment when music, class, and celebrity converged to define an era. With Oasis set to reunite for a 2025 world tour, Peyton’s portrait regains a flicker of immediacy, a snapshot of brothers suspended between harmony and rupture.