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Lot Essay
Elizabeth Peyton has long explored the intersections between painting, music, and the emotional permanence that binds them. “Making art is making something live forever. Painting and art is a way of holding onto things and making things go on through time” (E. Peyton, quoted in “J. Cocker, Elizabeth Peyton,” Interview Magazine, 26 November 2008, online, [accessed 10/15/25]). That enduring transmission of feeling is at the heart of Peyton’s practice, and nowhere is it more vividly expressed than in Flowers, Lichtenstein, Parsifal (2011). Here, the artist unites three central strands of her oeuvre—portraiture, still life, and art-historical homage—into a single, deeply resonant image.
Painted in preparation for her landmark 2011 exhibition at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, which coincided with their production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the work encapsulates Peyton’s fascination with the grand narratives and emotional intensity of opera. Immersing herself in Wagner's music—what she describes as a “gigantic feat” of emotional storytelling—she sought to match its transcendence in paint. In this intimate composition, the program for Parsifal, Wagner’s final opera, stands behind a vase of lilac anemones, whose delicate petals evoke both the fleeting nature of beauty and the operatic themes of love and mortality.
The vase itself bears the coat of arms of Queen Elizabeth II, a subtle nod to another of Peyton’s recurring subjects: royalty. Across her career, Peyton has portrayed monarchs and their family members with care and fascination. Here, only the word Elizabeth is visible—a wry, self-referential gesture that collapses the distance between artist and subject, painter and queen.
Above, Peyton introduces a fragment of Roy Lichtenstein’s preparatory sketch for I Know How You Must Feel, Brad… (1964), its Ben-Day dots reimagined through her fluid, expressive hand. The Pop master’s graphic language, Wagner’s mythic narrative, and the lush vitality of the floral still life coexist within a single frame—a portrait of artistic inheritance and emotional communion. In Flowers, Lichtenstein, Parsifal, Peyton transcends genre and subject, creating a meditation on beauty, devotion, and the sustaining dialogue between art forms across time.
Painted in preparation for her landmark 2011 exhibition at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, which coincided with their production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the work encapsulates Peyton’s fascination with the grand narratives and emotional intensity of opera. Immersing herself in Wagner's music—what she describes as a “gigantic feat” of emotional storytelling—she sought to match its transcendence in paint. In this intimate composition, the program for Parsifal, Wagner’s final opera, stands behind a vase of lilac anemones, whose delicate petals evoke both the fleeting nature of beauty and the operatic themes of love and mortality.
The vase itself bears the coat of arms of Queen Elizabeth II, a subtle nod to another of Peyton’s recurring subjects: royalty. Across her career, Peyton has portrayed monarchs and their family members with care and fascination. Here, only the word Elizabeth is visible—a wry, self-referential gesture that collapses the distance between artist and subject, painter and queen.
Above, Peyton introduces a fragment of Roy Lichtenstein’s preparatory sketch for I Know How You Must Feel, Brad… (1964), its Ben-Day dots reimagined through her fluid, expressive hand. The Pop master’s graphic language, Wagner’s mythic narrative, and the lush vitality of the floral still life coexist within a single frame—a portrait of artistic inheritance and emotional communion. In Flowers, Lichtenstein, Parsifal, Peyton transcends genre and subject, creating a meditation on beauty, devotion, and the sustaining dialogue between art forms across time.