The piece, painted by Thomas Taylor, was used for the first book in the series.
The original watercolor cover art for J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone just sold for a record-breaking $1.9 million.
The auction took place at Sotheby’s in New York and also featured other works of English and American literature.
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A Modern Classic
The Harry Potter illustration was expected to sell for around $600,000. Sotheby’s stated that this was already the highest pre-sale value for an item related to the series.
The auction concluded after a 10-minute, four-way bidding where the piece fetched over three times the original estimate.
Author and illustrator Thomas Taylor created the piece in 1996. He was only 23 years old when publisher Barry Cunningham hired him. The painting depicts Harry Potter with his dark hair, round glasses, and lightning bolt-shaped scar standing in front of the Hogwarts Express.
According to The New York Times, Taylor—a recent art school graduate at the time—received a commission of just $650 for his very first professional assignment. He also finished the piece in two days.
“It’s kind of staggering, really,” he said about the sale of his painting. “It’s exciting to see it fought over.”
Taylor’s piece was first auctioned in 2001 where it sold for $106,000, four times its estimated sale price. In an Instagram post, the artist wrote that it went to a private collector from the United States and “vanished from sight.”
“I’m amazed to see it resurface, all these years later. I had expected the colours to have faded—the inks I used are not lightfast—but the image appears to have been carefully stored away, and is still bright.”
The Boy Wizard in Auctions
The auction record for any Harry Potter-related item previously went to a first edition of Philosopher’s Stone. Heritage Auctions sold the book for $471,000 in 2021, setting the world record for the most expensive 20th century work of fiction ever sold.
In an ongoing auction of Fine Books and Manuscripts, Sotheby’s is offering an original, handwritten copy of Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard. The auction house expects the manuscript to fetch around $250,000 to $350,000. It’s one of only six copies the author created as gifts to the people closest to the Harry Potter series.
This copy in particular belonged to Cunningham, the same publisher from Bloomsbury who hired Taylor. The dedication in the book reads “To Barry, the man who thought an overlong novel about a boy wizard in glasses might just sell… THANK YOU.”
Rowling made a seventh copy specifically for sale at auction, bound with silver ornaments and mounted semi-precious stones just like the others. Sotheby’s sold it in 2007 for $3 million. Proceeds from the sale went to the charity now known as Lumos.
Bought by Amazon, its selling price still holds the world record for a modern literary manuscript. Rowling didn’t intend to publish the book at first, but it was eventually made available to the public in 2008.
Banner image via Sotheby’s official website.
