How a Brooklyn Painter Ended Up Merging Jagger, Richards and Wood Into One Face for the Stones’ New Cover

The Rolling Stones’ new album cover began with a phone call to a Brooklyn kitchen. Last fall, the painter Nathaniel Mary Quinn took a three-way call with Mick Jagger and the producer Andrew Watt, and by the end of it he had agreed to make the artwork for Foreign Tongues, the band’s 25th studio album, out July 10. “I’m standing in my kitchen talking to Mick Jagger,” Quinn told ARTnews. “It was surreal.”

The image is a colorful, unsettling composite portrait that folds the faces of Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood into one head. Reuters described it as a “colourful, almost grotesque, three-in-one composite likeness.” The band teased it as a puzzle on May 2, with each member posting what looked like one third of the cover on Instagram, per Ultimate Classic Rock. Quinn also redrew the band’s tongue-and-lips logo for the campaign.

From a Gagosian show to the Stones

It started with Quinn’s Gagosian show in Chelsea last September, Echoes from Copeland, which Jagger visited twice. A few weeks later, the music executive Jimmy Iovine texted Quinn’s wife and studio manager, Donna Augustine Quinn, to say the Stones needed someone for the new cover. Quinn pitched the merge-three-faces idea on that first call, and Jagger replied immediately: “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

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The band played him three unreleased tracks to get him going. “They felt that if I could hear some of the music, maybe it could generate ideas,” Quinn said. For nine months he spoke with Jagger and Richards roughly every two weeks, studied photographs, and pulled details from each face: Richards’s headband, Wood’s hair and nose, “naturally, Jagger’s lips,” as ARTnews put it. Richards invited him to a private rehearsal in Lower Manhattan, and Jagger met him for lunch across from MoMA to talk about family, London and the Black American musicians who shaped the band.

Not everything went smoothly. Jagger worried the first painting looked “a little scary,” so Quinn painted a second, with the three bandmembers getting out of a vintage sports car. The band chose the original unanimously. Quinn still owns both paintings and, importantly, the copyright.

The launch, with Conan

The cover had its public debut at a launch party at the Weylin in Brooklyn on Tuesday, May 5, where the three Stones walked a red carpet and Conan O’Brien interviewed them beneath Quinn’s artwork. The album’s lead single, “In the Stars,” arrived the same day, per Reuters. Quinn says Elton John, who already owned one of his works, FaceTimed after seeing the reveal.

You’ve made album covers cool again!

Elton John, as recalled by Nathaniel Mary Quinn, ARTnews

Quinn says the most surreal moment came on stage. When O’Brien asked about the painting, Jagger praised him in front of the room. “Man,” Quinn said, “Mick Jagger gave me a tribute in front of all those people. It was amazing.”

Foreign Tongues is the Stones’ first studio album since 2023’s Hackney Diamonds, which won the Grammy for best rock album, and it features Paul McCartney, Steve Winwood, Robert Smith of The Cure and Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, according to Reuters. For another rock album cover with a gallery pedigree, see our report on Bon Iver’s 22, A Million anniversary edition.

Added to the High Grailed archive on October 12, 2026.