Thomas Taylor, who painted the watercolor, is one of the first to read the manuscript of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
The original watercolor illustration of the book has become the most valuable Harry Potter item ever sold, says the British broadcasting company BBC on their website.
The watercolor was sold for 1.9 million dollars, or about 1.77 million euros, at the Sotheby’s auction in the United States. The auctioned work is the first visualization of Harry Potter.
According to the BBC, the identity of the buyer has not been revealed.
by JK Rowling Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone first edition illustration sold for more than three times the expected price.
The artwork was expected to fetch between $400,000 and $600,000, which Sotheby’s said would have already been the highest pre-sale estimate for a Harry Potter-related item.
It was first auctioned in 2001 for £85,750 (about €101,330 at current exchange rates) before the entire book series was completed.
The illustration was painted by an artist Thomas Taylor. Taylor was just 23 years old in 1997 when he took the iconic photo of Harry Potter standing in front of the Hogwarts Express.
Taylor has said that in 1996 he worked in a bookstore selling children’s books in Cambridge and that he sent sketches of various children’s book illustration ideas to book publishers.
One of them reached Bloomsbury, the publisher of Harry Potter, who engaged Taylor to do illustrations for the upcoming wizarding book. Taylor was thus one of the first people to read the original Harry Potter book manuscript.
The book has since sold millions of copies and spawned a lucrative franchise of merchandise, movies and theme parks.