Four people bid by telephone for 10 minutes until they reached that price
The watercolor by the artist Thomas Taylor painted for ‘The Philosopher’s Stone’ and which fixed the image of Harry Potter in the collective imagination, was sold this Wednesday by 1.9 million dollarsthree times its highest estimate ($600,000), auction house Sotheby’s said.
Four people bid by telephone for 10 minutes until they reached that price, the highest ever achieved for an object related to the popular character created by the British writer JK Rowling in 1997.
Taylor painted his watercolor when he was only 23 years old and when he himself did not imagine the ‘boom’ that the saga of the boy-wizard was going to bringtranslated into 80 languages and which has sold more than half a million copies, in addition to becoming a character in a film and a Broadway musical.
The watercolor – depicting Harry Potter as a bespectacled boy with brown hair and a red and yellow striped scarf – was first auctioned in London in 2001, and then also quadrupled estimates to sell in 85,750 pounds.
On this occasion, it has been put up for sale by the collector Rodney P. Swantkoalong with pieces of literature from Europe and the United States from the 19th and 20th centuries.
