Bob Dylan, Mr Tambourine Man, 2026

Lithograph on paper

102.87 x 74.93 cm (40.5 x 29.5 in)

Edition of 495

Hand-signed by the artist

Composed in 1964 while on the road between New Orleans’ Mardi Gras and his return to New York, and indebted, by his own account, to Federico Fellini's 1954 classic La Strada, 'Mr. Tambourine Man' announced Dylan’s shift as a songwriter, beyond the limits of activism and protest folk, into a language of pure image. Tom Piazza described the song as freeing Dylan into ‘a creative place beyond ideology’. Dylan's hand-coloured illustration answers the song's hushed, sleepless small hours with an empty cobbled lane under a saturated, inky blue sky, its terraced houses rendered in playful ochre, rose and green hues. This is a dreamscape stripped of figures, in which Dylan’s use of colour transforms line into pure light.

First album release: Bringing It All Back Home, 1965