Original Watercolour of Harry Potter Book Cover Sells for Record $1.9 Million at US Auction
Who could believe? What a fabulous price! How much? An original J.K. Rowling “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” first edition cover watercolor painting brought in the unbelievable amount of one million nine hundred thousand dollars at a U.S. auction.
The painting was first auctioned in 2001 during book writing, and later it was sold for three times more than its estimated price, which made it the most expensive Harry Potter auction item at the time.
The item was estimated at $400,000 to $600,000, which was quite a record for the highest entrance in pre-sale auctions for Harry Potter-related work.
The demand was intense with four potential buyers competing for 10 minutes on Wednesday, the seller’s name in the meanwhile remains secret. In 1997, the chart-topping artist, Thomas Taylor was a boy at the age of 23 when he gave the world the treasured picture of Harry Potter and the Hogwarts Express. The artist used heavy watercolours that had a black pencil outline and managed to finish the piece in just two days.
The great writer who sold out millions of copies and began a period of prosperity with the Harry Potter movies and theme parks wrote the first Harry Potter installment, the manuscript of which the young artist was so reluctant to show and therefore became one of the first few to read it. Taylor read the draft material of the first Harry Potter’s book before it reached the multitude of readers across the globe and subsequently women on television started to duplicate it.
