Watercolor painting for the book ‘Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone’ has fetched a record price at auction.
The artwork for the cover of the first book in the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling was sold for $1.9 million by Sotheby’s auction house in New York on Wednesday.
According to Sotheby’s, it is now “the most valuable Harry Potter item ever sold at auction.”
A copy of the first edition of “Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone” was sold for the highest price so far, for $421,000 at an auction by Heritage Auctions in Dallas, USA in December 2021.
Thomas Taylor’s illustration, which appeared in the first edition of the novel, depicts the budding wizard, with dark hair, round glasses, and a mark shaped like a lightning bolt, on his way to Hogwarts, the boarding school for wizards.
Taylor, who wrote the Erie-On-Sea series of children’s books, was commissioned at the age of 23 to create the cover for a new children’s fantasy novel. He was a graduate student working in a bookstore in Cambridge, England.
The auction house called his illustration a “universal icon” that defined the look of Harry Potter. The house’s initial estimate for the sale price of the work was $400,000-$600,000.
