Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney was born on 18 June 1942 in Liverpool, England. He attended the Liverpool Institute, a Liverpool grammar school, from around 1953, and did not go on to university or complete a formal art or music degree; he has said he never learned to read music. He rose to international fame as bassist, singer, and songwriter with The Beatles, then continued as a solo artist and with the band Wings, and remains active as a touring and recording musician; a new studio album, "The Boys of Dungeon Lane," was released on 29 May 2026.

Alongside music, McCartney has painted since the mid-1980s, kept largely private at first. His first public exhibition of his paintings opened in Siegen, Germany, on 30 April 1999. He is also a photographer: a body of roughly 250 personal photographs he took during The Beatles' rapid rise in late 1963 and early 1964, largely unseen for decades, forms the exhibition "Paul McCartney Photographs 1963 to 64: Eyes of the Storm," organized by the National Portrait Gallery, London, in collaboration with the artist and curated with staff from his company, MPL Communications. The show has traveled to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and, in 2026, to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. In 2026 the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland opened "Paul McCartney and Wings," an exhibition drawn from his personal archive of artifacts related to his 1970s band. He is reported to hold an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Music in London, dated to 1995. He was appointed MBE in 1965, knighted for services to music in 1997, and named to the Order of the Companions of Honour in 2017. He continues to live and work between the United Kingdom and the United States.

Critical commentary on McCartney's visual work concentrates almost entirely on the "Eyes of the Storm" photography exhibition rather than on his paintings, which have received comparatively little sustained art-critical attention. Writing on the museum's own exhibition materials, critics including Shoshi Parks of 7x7 and Gabe Meline of KQED both framed the photographs' value as documentary and historical, describing them as offering a rare, singular vantage point on Beatlemania and as images that register the band's bewilderment at being thrust into global fame. Local television coverage from ABC7 in San Francisco described the show in similarly experiential terms, emphasizing the immediacy of the crowds and fan reaction. The consistent critical thread is that the photographs matter as a first-person historical record of a specific six-month period rather than as evidence of a distinct, mature visual style.

McCartney's market as a visual artist is small and lightly documented compared with his fame. Market databases MutualArt and Artprice track his auction appearances (Artprice lists 25 lots under the spelling "Paul Maccartney," a cataloguing variant of the same individual), with MutualArt citing realized prices reported up to USD 81,297 for paintings and USD 50,000 for prints and works on paper across a limited number of recorded lots; the exact lot count and these figures have not been independently corroborated beyond the MutualArt listing. No single record-setting lot with a full title, house, and date was available to confirm in current sources.

These figures should be kept separate from a much larger and better documented market in McCartney-associated instruments and memorabilia. The Yamaha BB-1200 "Wings" bass guitar he played sold for USD 496,100 (reported as a record price for a bass guitar at auction) at a Van Eaton Galleries charity auction in Los Angeles in December 2021; the exact sale date could not be independently confirmed. That price reflects an object he used on stage, not a painting or photograph he authored, and collectors should not conflate the two categories.

McCartney's name is sometimes confused in market databases with the American artist Paul McCarthy (born 1945), whose contemporary sculpture and installation work commands multi-million-dollar prices at auction; the two are unrelated artists, and Masterworks Academy records treat them separately despite the similar spelling. There is no catalogue raisonne for McCartney's paintings or photographs, and verification runs through MPL Communications and the institutions that organize his exhibitions rather than through a dedicated authentication board. His documented auction results for paintings and works on paper are modest and drawn from a relatively small, imprecisely documented pool of lots, so any single sale should be read with caution rather than as a stable price trend. Collectors interested specifically in McCartney material should also be careful to distinguish authored artworks from the far larger and more liquid market in signed items, instruments, and other memorabilia, which trade on a different basis entirely.