The art and life of Pattie Boyd, the woman in the centre of the love triangle between Eric Clapton and a Beatle, has come up for auction
Pattie Boyd was the girlfriend of two of the great figures in rock music in the 1960s and 1970s — and Christie's are holding a sale of her memorabilia.


The woman who inspired rock’s most famous love triangle is now the subject of a Christie’s sale, which runs until March 22.
The devotion of model and photographer Pattie Boyd’s husbands — George Harrison, whom she met on the set of A Hard Day’s Night (1964), and Eric Clapton — is evident in the songs they wrote for her, such as The Beatles’s Something (1969).
Meanwhile, Clapton’s Layla (1970) was written in a haze of unrequited love, while Ms Boyd was still married to his friend; Wonderful Tonight (1977) came later, after she had left Harrison to be with him in 1974.
The Pattie Boyd Collections features various letters, handwritten lyrics and photographs, the original artwork, by Frandsen De Schomberg, said to look like Ms Boyd and used for the cover of the 1970 Derek and The Dominos album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (£40,000–£60,000) and a design doodle for an Apple Records LP label by Harrison (£3,000–£5,000).
All 111 lots are offered online from March 8–22, and will be available for the public to view at Christie’s St James’s HQ on March 15–21. See more details about the lots, and place a bid, at christies.com.
All from Images: The Pattie Boyd Collection via Christie’s Images Ltd 2024.
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Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.
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