Legendary musician and artist, Bob Dylan, backstage with his customary cigarette at the Montfort Hall in Leicester, 1965.
Bob Dylan is best known for being one of – if not the – greatest singer-songwriter the world has ever seen, but he is also a talented visual artist. Much of Dylan’s artistic output explores similar themes and ideas as his iconic songs, and interest in his artwork has grown steadily in recent years.
Dylan has experimented with painting, sculpting, and printmaking, and his work has been featured in exhibitions around the world to critical acclaim. But it is prints which dominate his market at auction, accounting for a massive 99% of his work sold this way, and usually fetching between £1,000 and £5,000.
Many of Dylan’s most expensive prints are from his famous Side Tracks series; they are in fact so popular that their value is explored more comprehensively in a separate article, and they are not included in the list below of Dylan’s other five most expensive prints sold at auction. If you own a Bob Dylan print and would like to know more about how much it might be worth, or how to sell it, please contact Mark Littler today.
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The Beaten Path, The Complete Collection
Bob Dylan has performed thousands of live shows in a career that spans more than six decades, and at the age of 83, he still often plays around 100 concerts a year. This has led his touring schedule to be dubbed the Never Ending Tour by the media, and although the musician himself is dismissive of the title, the tour’s tag does have some credence: it started in June 1988.
Now ongoing for over 35 years, the tour means Dylan is often on the move, travelling between different continents, countries, and venues. The Beaten Path prints are inspired by this experience. As Dylan said, they’re about “how you see the American landscape while crisscrossing the land and seeing it for what it’s worth. Staying out of the mainstream and travelling the back roads, free-born style.”
The prints are essentially beautiful portraits of frequently-overlooked locations, and they’re very popular in today’s market; one 2017 edition of the portfolio was sold by Bonhams on 12 June 2024 for £28,000, right after a 2016 edition was sold for the same price at the same auction.
The Beaten Path, The Complete Collection sold by Bonhams in 2024
Drawn Blank
This set of 14 prints in two portfolios was sold by Rosebery’s in November 2022 for £22,000. The prints are reworkings of drawings that Dylan made whilst on tour across three different continents between 1989 and 1992; the sketches are snapshots of moments frozen in time, and they were first unveiled to the public in Dylan’s Drawn Blank artist’s book, published in 1994.
In much the same way as Dylan constantly reinvents his songs and performs new, experimental versions of them on stage, he reimagined his Drawn Blank sketches into a series of paintings, and these subsequently became prints. They are among Dylan’s most sought-after in today’s market, and they display his talent as a colourist while offering a poetic yet unpretentious glimpse of his life on tour. It was also in the Drawn Blank series that Dylan’s Train Tracks sketch first appeared; it has subsequently become its own print series, and it’s widely thought of as being Dylan’s most iconic image.
Drawn Blank sold by Rosebery’s in 2022
Mondo Scripto/Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (From The Mondo Scripto Series)
Bob Dylan’s Mondo Scripto series is a stunning visual expression of the lyrics of some of his most legendary songs, including ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, ‘All Along The Watchtower’, and ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’. Originally handwritten on paper with accompanying pencil drawings, the lithographs give a glimpse of Dylan’s own interpretation of his poetic lyrics, with some drawings having obvious links to the songs, and others being more cryptic.
Within the Mondo Scripto collection is also a portfolio of prints focusing on one of Dylan’s most iconic songs: ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’. First written for the soundtrack of the 1973 revisionist Western, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (which also starred Dylan), the song has been covered countless times in the decades since by music greats including Eric Clapton and Guns N’ Roses. It is due to songs such as this that Dylan became the first ever singer-songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.
Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door portfolio dissects the brief song line by line, with each line accompanied by a relevant drawing, which can be, by turns, tragic, comical, or thought-provoking. In November 2023, Roseberys sold the boxed Mondo Scripto and Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door portfolios for £20,000.
Mondo Scripto/Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (From The Mondo Scripto Series) sold by Rosebery’s in 2023
Train Tracks
Dylan’s Train Tracks may well be his most famous and best loved image, so much so that there is an entire series of prints based on it. Its popularity can partly be attributed to the fact that it captures something of the restlessness that imbues so many of Dylan’s songs, as well as his public persona – he is, after all, the man Joan Baez called “the original vagabond” who “burst on the scene already a legend.” This silkscreen of Train Tracks from 2019 highlights Dylan’s masterful use of colour and instinctive, energetic lines, and it was sold by Roseberys in September 2023 for £15,900.
Train Tracks sold by Rosebery’s in 2023
The Complete 2008 Folio Of 12 Prints (Woman In Red Lion Pub/Man On Bridge/Train Tracks)
All three of these images initially appeared in Dylan’s Drawn Blank series; in this 2008 folio, each of the graphics is reworked four times as the artist plays with the effect of colour and tone, experimenting with how they change the feel of the image. As Dylan once wrote, “every picture spoke a different language to me as the various colours were applied.” The 12 prints were sold by Roseberys in June 2024 for £14,000.
The Complete 2008 Folio Of 12 Prints (Woman In Red Lion Pub/Man On Bridge/Train Tracks) sold by Rosebery’s in 2024
