Collectors are moving on from first editions to the original art that went into them:
Last October, Garth Williams’s original drawing for the cover of E.B. White’s 1952 book “Charlotte’s Web” sold at Heritage Auctions for $155,350, five times its high estimate. Two years before that, a British collector paid Sotheby’s in London a record $578,384 for Ms. Potter’s 6-inch-square watercolor, “The Rabbits’ Christmas Party: The Departure.”
On Monday, Sotheby’s in New York will test this market again by offering up 193 original illustrations for children’s books priced to sell for at least $989,000 combined.
Sotheby’s sale is peppered with recognizable characters like “Winnie-the-Pooh,” “Madeline” and “Babar,” each priced to sell for at least $40,000. But the pricier works in the sale stretch back to the late 1800s and early 1900s, including Jessie Willcox Smith’s 1910 portrait of a young girl with rosy cheeks, “How Doth the Little Busy Bee.” Originally published in “A Child’s Book of Old Verses,” the portrait is priced to sell for at least $200,000.
The pool of collectors who focus on original children’s book art is still relatively small and concentrated in America, Britain and Japan, according to Nick Clark, chief curator of the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Mass. But the category also draws its share of one-time buyers determined to own something by a childhood favorite like E.H. Shepard, who drew A.A. Milne’s “Pooh” characters.
By and large, collectors will pay more for an illustration used on a cover than for anything displayed inside; they’ll also pay more for a “Babar” elephant drawn by series creator Jean de Brunhoff than for subsequent versions by Mr. de Brunhoff’s son, Laurent.
Since the recession, values seem to be holding up best for children’s-book art made between 1880 and 1940, an era known as the Golden Age of Illustration when technological advances in printing presses made it possible to churn out colorfully ornate books.
Among children’s books, this canon includes British illustrator Arthur Rackham (1867-1939), whose otherworldly characters blend the grotesque imagery of Norse mythology with the Zen of Japanese woodblock prints. Sotheby’s wants at least $50,000 for Mr. Rackham’s pair of 1906 watercolors, “Two Winter Fables: Mother Goose [and] Jack Frost.” Other favorites include Danish illustrator Kay Nielsen (1886–1957), who is best known for his work in Walt Disney’s “Fantasia.”
