After an announcement of the sale on Instagram, actor Johnny Depp made $3.6 million selling his paintings and prints in only a few hours on Thursday.
The Pirates of the Caribbean star announced that four of his original paintings of pop icons as well as prints would go on sale through Castle Fine Art’s 37 gallery of Birmingham, England, Insider reported.
The gallery’s website was hit by such a rush of buyers that it briefly went down, and in only a few hours all four of the original paintings and the entire run of prints had been sold out.
The four paintings, entitled “Friends and Heroes,” features pop culture icons Al Pacino, Keith Richards, Bob Dylan, and Elizabeth Taylor, and is created in a pop art style not entirely dissimilar to that of Andy Warhol. And each of the original pieces sold for $18,000 apiece.
All told, the gallery offered 780 prints of the works, and all sold out.
The gallery noted that the subjects of the paintings are “people [Depp] has known well, and who have inspired him as a person.”
“I’ve always used art to express my feelings and to reflect on those who matter most to me, like my family, friends and people I admire. My paintings surround my life, but I kept them to myself and limited myself. No one should ever limit themselves,” Depp said in a quote on the gallery’s website.
The wildly successful sale comes on the heels of the completion of Depp’s defamation lawsuit against ex-wife Amber Heard, whom the star sued over a Washington Post article from 2018 in which he said the actress defamed him.
The trial ended in a decision that held that both actors defamed each other, however, Depp was awarded $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages while Heard was awarded only $2 million for her counterclaim, a message that the courts found Heard more at fault in the situation.
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