In 1967 the Beatles restructured their financial empire and founded Apple Corps. Ltd. The company served two basic functions, firstly it provided a workable tax shelter for The Beatles in Great Britain and secondly it provided a broad based management company to handle the Beatles creative dalliances. Paul McCartney described the aims of the company to ...make an environment - an umbrella where people can do things the way they want... and Lennon ... to see if we can get artistic freedom within a business structure... The Apple Shop [John apparently hated the word 'boutique'] was one of the first Apple Corps projects to get underway, ...The Beatles gave The Fool 100,000 pounds to open a boutique on the ground floor of a building they'd recently discovered had been bought for them as an investment..."The Fool" were originally a group of countercultural fashion plates led by Dutch artist and designer Simon Posthuma. Late of a fashionable but failed boutique called 'The Trend' in Amsterdam, the group became official fashion designers to The Beatles, supplying the costumes for the "All You Need Is Love" world wide television production in the spring of 1967.. their designs apparently represented the four elements Earth, Fire, Water and Air and the clothes were characterized by bright colours and an original mixture of materials such as silks, satins and velvets. ...The Fool came up with a spectacular way of advertising their new presence on the street - building-high mural covering the outside of the Apple headquarters, a work that was the very epitome of the contemporary astrology-oriented psychedelic art style -- a buoyant genie afloat in stars, planets, and swirling clouds of colour.... Once their proposal for the mural had been approved by The Beatles, The Fool evolved a system for its execution similar to the commercial 'paint by numbers' kits. For a week they laid out designs on both the interior and exterior walls and then hired thirty art students to fill in the colours. It apparently took 36 hours to paint the exterior of this three storey store and a week to do the interior. A party to celebrate the launch of the store was held on December 5th, 1967, reports differ as to how many of The Beatles actually attended, but it is safe to say that the opening was the hottest ticket in town... The Fool's mural was the subject of much complaint from local residents and shop keepers and on May 18th, 1968 was painted over and replaced by a plain coat of white paint and the word Apple in black script. The Apple shop itself only had an eight-month tenure and closed after a two-day free giveaway of the remaining stock and a blaze of publicity on July 31st, 1968.

The Fool's artwork captured the essence of the psychedelic era and the Apple Shop venture epitomized the fate of the Apple dream. The mock-up in this lot is one of the few remaining pieces of this Dutch group's work to survive from the 1960s.