Original watercolor illustration has become the most valuable Harry Potter item ever sold, fetching 1.9 million dollars (1.7 million euros) at auction at Sotheby’s in New York. The artwork used later as cover for the first edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” by JK Rowling was purchased for more than three times its starting estimate, which was around $600,000, which according to Sotheby’s was the highest figure for an heirloom linked to the bespectacled wizard. The auction took nearly 10 minutes to conclude on Wednesday evening with four bidders battling to grab the illustration. The identity of the buyer was not revealed.
The watercolor was painted by British artist Thomas Taylor at the age of 23 and he was one of the first to read Rowling’s manuscript: it appeared on the cover of the first Potter book in 1997 and was then used by the English publisher Bloomsbury Publishing for a commemorative reprint to mark its 25th anniversary last year. It is about theIconic image of Harry Potter standing in front of the Hogwarts Expressthe 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 ( $107,000).