This portrait was featured in Andy Warhol's New York Apartment until he died in February 1987. This particular canvas was never intended to be for public acquisition and was fought over by the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the Warhol Foundation in New York. The Foundation eventually acquired the piece. Jon Gould died in 1986, one year before Warhol died, and was one of the few people that Warhol cared for deeply. Jon Gould was a high flying Paramount movie executive of the 1980's. He lived with Andy Warhol during the early 1980's and was the reason Warhol added the Paramount logo to his "Ads" series. Gould's family had been puzzled over the exact nature of his relationship with the artist, one that even by Warhols standards, was a strange brew of jet-setting glamour, puppy-love infatuation, sexual ambiguity, and commercial calculation, with a pinch of Hollywood stardust thrown in.

An 'incredible electricity' between them, Warhol and Jon Gould met in 1980 when Warhol was 52 and on the rebound from a broken love affair and Gould was 27, the scion of a wealthy North Shore family. He had graduated from running Rolling Stone magazine's advertising department to a plum Paramount Pictures vice presidency, where he specialized in marketing youth-culture movies such as "Flashdance" and "Urban Cowboy." Gould hoped to become a line producer and shuttled regularly between Hollywood and New York. Warhol was smitten with Gould, not only for his looks and youth. John Gould was also a member of Hollywood's inner sanctum, a club Warhol badly wanted to break into. Not only was this work of obvious personal importance to Warhol, it also incorporates his repeating imagery for which he is so famous. We have never seen a Warhol portrait with a triple image - aside from his early priceless works such as Elvis.