Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone artwork sells for record £1.5m

A watercolour drawing for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone has fetched a record amount at auction.

The artwork for the cover of the first book in the JK Rowling series fetched $1.9m (£1.5m) at a sale by Sotheby’s auction house in New York on Wednesday.

The dealer said it was “the most valuable Harry Potter item ever sold at auction”.

A first edition copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was thought to be the highest price recorded for an item from the fantasy series. It sold for $421,000 at Heritage Auctions in Dallas in December 2021.

The illustration by Thomas Taylor, which featured on the debut edition of the novel in 1997, was sold after a four-way battle between bidders lasting nearly 10 minutes.

It had an estimate of $400,000 to $600,000, which Sotheby’s claims is the “highest pre-sale estimate ever placed on an item of any Harry Potter-related work”.

The watercolour was first offered at auction in 2001 at Sotheby’s London, when only the first four books in the series had been published.

At the time, the depiction of the budding wizard, with his dark hair, round glasses and lightning bolt scar, on his way to Hogwarts by train, was estimated at £20,000 to £25,000 before being sold at £85,750.

Taylor, who went on to write the children’s series Eerie-on-Sea, had his first professional commission with Harry Potter at the age of 23. After being asked to illustrate the character by the publisher Barry Cunningham at Bloomsbury, Taylor took two days to complete the illustration.

He used concentrated watercolours on cold-pressed watercolour paper and outlined with black Karisma pencil. Taylor was among the first to read the manuscript.

All bids include the buyer’s premium.

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