A watercolor used for the cover of the first Harry Potter book sold for £1.5 million in New York.
Auctioneer Sotheby’s said it was “the most valuable Harry Potter item never sold at auction.”
Four bidders battled it out for nearly 10 minutes before the anonymous buyer emerged victorious.
It last sold for £85,750, but that was in 2001, when only four Potter books had been published.
The Thomas Taylor painting had an estimated price of between $400,000 and $600,000 (£320,420-£480,630) for Wednesday’s auction.
Taylor was just 23 years old when Barry Cunningham of publishers Bloomsbury commissioned the work and completed the artwork in two days.
He used concentrated watercolors and outlined the illustration with black Karisma pencil.
Now familiar to millions of people, it shows Harry and his lightning bolt scar next to the Hogwarts Express.
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Taylor, who later wrote the children’s series Erie-On-Sea, was also among the first to read JK RowlingManuscript of The Philosopher’s Stone.
The £1.5m sale surpasses the $421,000 (£327,000) paid for a first edition of the same book at a Dallas auction in 2021.
In 2023, a worn first edition of The Sorcerer’s Stone, which used to be a library book and was purchased for 30 pence, sold for over £10,000.
This story originally appeared on News.sky.com read the full story
