An original watercolor illustration became the subject of the saga of Harry Potter most valuable ever sold, fetching 1.9 million dollars (1.7 million euros) at auction from Sotheby’s to New York. The artwork later used as the cover for the first edition of «Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” Of JK Rowling it was purchased for more than three times the starting estimate, which was around 600 thousand dollars, which according to Sotheby’s was the highest figure for an heirloom linked to the bespectacled wizard. It took almost 10 minutes for the auction to end Wednesday evening with four bidders battling to grab the illustration.
The auction
The identity of the buyer was not revealed. The watercolor was painted by British artist Thomas Taylor at the age of 23 and had been one of the first to read Rowling’s manuscript: it appeared on the cover of the first Potter book in 1997 and was later used by the publishing house English Bloomsbury Publishing for a commemorative reprint to mark its 25th anniversary last year.
The illustration
This is the iconic image of Harry Potter standing in front of the Hogwarts Express, the train that would take the young wizard to the magical world of Hogwarts School. The illustration was first auctioned at Sotheby’s in London in 2001, when only four of the seven books in the series had been published, and at the time it broke a record for Rowling’s franchise by selling for £85,750 ( 107 thousand dollars).
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