Collectors and Collections

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      Cover Art for ‘Harry Potter’ Sold at Auction for $1.92 Million

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      The watercolor was painted in 1996 by a recent art school graduate from Britain who was working at a bookstore. He was paid $650.The original cover art for the first edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” sold for $1.92 million at auction on Wednesday, becoming the most expensive item related to the series, decades after its illustrator was paid a commission of just $650.The watercolor painting, which depicts the young wizard Harry going to Hogwarts from Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross station, was part of the private library of an American book collector and surgeon, Dr. Rodney P. Swantko, whose other rare items were auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York this week.The year before the novel came out in 1997, its publisher, Bloomsbury, hired a 23-year-old from England who had just graduated from art school to design the book jacket, the auction house said. The artist, Thomas Taylor, would go on to establish the world’s conception of Harry Potter, with his iconic round glasses and lightning bolt scar.“It’s kind of staggering, really,” he said about the sale of his painting in an interview on Thursday. “It’s exciting to see it fought over.”Mr. Taylor was working at a children’s bookstore when he submitted sample drawings of wizards and dragons for the publisher in London to review, he said in a 2022 podcast interview. When he was selected, he said, “I was over the moon.”The cover was Mr. Taylor’s first professional assignment. And, at the time, “J.K. Rowling was as unknown as I was,” he wrote in his blog, referring to the novel’s British author.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Collectors Line Up in London as King Charles Bank Notes Are Released

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      A steady stream of people lined up at the Bank of England on Wednesday to get what they hoped would be collector’s items: the first bank notes featuring the portrait of King Charles III.Bank notes can still be exciting in our increasingly cashless society.On Wednesday morning, in front of the Bank of England headquarters, a queue — that’s a British line, which is the same as an American line but more orderly — formed, as people walked out with collector’s items: the first bills with King Charles III’s portrait on them.In the queue were avid coin collectors, people with nostalgic feelings toward the new bank note (the first in their lifetime showing a new monarch) and the odd tourist who happened to need old money changed.The bank has issued 5, 10, 20 and 50 pound bills with the new designs, which are similar in color scheme to the bills in circulation with Queen Elizabeth II on them. Bills with the Queen’s portrait on them will remain in circulation across the country, alongside the ones with King Charles.Although Brits are accustomed to seeing the monarch on their money, it wasn’t always the case. The Bank of England began printing bank notes in 1725, but it was not until 1960 that bills featured the monarch. Until that time, Britannia — the personification of Britain — had been the only character on the bills.The modest but steady line moved along swiftly on Wednesday, with people spending no more than 20 minutes to exchange their money.An orderly line outside the Bank of England headquarters in central London, on Wednesday.Claire Moses/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sam Butcher, Who Gave the World Precious Moments, Dies at 85

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      His childlike porcelain characters thrilled and inspired generations of collectors. They also made him a millionaire.Sam Butcher, the soft-spoken artist whose doe-eyed, pastel-hued porcelain Precious Moments figurines ignited a global collecting frenzy and made him a wealthy man, and whose Christian faith spurred him to build his own version of the Sistine Chapel in Carthage, Mo., died on May 20 at his home there. He was 85.His death was confirmed by his son Jon.Mr. Butcher was the Michelangelo of Missouri, and his adorable snub-nosed Precious Moments characters were “the Beanie Babies of porcelain,” as The Wall Street Journal once put it. Their zealous collectors, who numbered in the hundreds of thousands, built rooms for their Precious Moments figurines, convened in regional clubs and made pilgrimages to Carthage, where they slept in the Precious Moments motel or the R.V. park, marveled at the Precious Moments Fountain of the Angels, dined in the Precious Moments food courts and wandered the 30-acre grounds. (Carthage also hosted Precious Moments weddings.)For a time, the Precious Moments Care-a-Van — an 18-wheeler kitted out like a museum, filled with figurines and dioramas that told Mr. Butcher’s life story — toured the country. There were hundreds and hundreds of Precious Moments licensees, which made hats, keychains, watches, greeting cards, books and a children’s Bible. At the company’s peak, in 1996 and 1997, Precious Moments’ global retail sales reached over $500 million each year, a stunning amount for a man who was once so poor that he struggled to buy groceries for his seven children.Mr. Butcher, whose fans sought him out at the Precious Moments compound to autograph their figurines and posters (he always carried two pens to do so), was an unlikely-looking millionaire: a rumpled figure typically clad in bluejeans and a T-shirt, with paint in his bushy hair and a shy smile.“Most people just think I’m the gardener,” he said.Mr. Butcher and a colleague began making greeting cards and posters featuring waifish children in the 1970s. A giftware company thought the characters had commercial potential as figurines. By 1995, Precious Moments were said to be the No. 1 collectible in the world.Lissa Forliti-Aska, via Associated PressMr. Butcher had been working with an international nondenominational ministry for children, teaching and illustrating Bible stories, when he and a colleague, Bill Biel, began making inspirational greeting cards and posters featuring his winsome characters in the early 1970s. “I came up with ‘Precious’ and he came up with ‘Moments,’” Mr. Butcher told The Kansas City Star in 1995.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sanford L. Smith, Creator of Prestigious Art Fairs, Dies at 84

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      Over four decades, he produced more than 150 events. Some dealers reported selling more in a weekend at a Smith fair than in a year in their galleries.Sanford L. Smith, an art lover and entrepreneur who created some of New York’s most prestigious art and design fairs, generating millions of dollars in sales and drawing attention to previously overlooked areas of art, died on Saturday at a senior living facility in Manhattan. He was 84.The cause was congestive heart failure, his wife, Jill Bokor, said.Mr. Smith didn’t invent the art fair, but he made his events essential stops for both buyers and sellers. Owners of some Lower Manhattan galleries would spend tens of thousands of dollars to move their wares a few miles north to the Park Avenue Armory, where many of Mr. Smith’s shows were held.Evan Snyderman, an owner of R & Company, a TriBeCa design gallery, said that at Salon Art + Design, one of Mr. Smith’s fairs, “we always reconnect with clients that we don’t see in other places — including New Yorkers who never come downtown.”Some dealers reported selling more art in a long weekend at a Sanford Smith fair than in a whole year at their own galleries.During his years in what he called “show business,” Mr. Smith ran more than 150 fairs, including the Fall Antiques Show, Modernism and the Outsider Art Fair. They were popular (in several cases attracting some 10,000 visitors over a three- or four-day weekend) as well as critical successes. The Times called his 2012 Salon “a museum in the making.” Asked to describe his career in a 2022 interview for this obituary, Mr. Smith said, “I filled holes.” What he meant was that he found gaps in between what other art fairs offered, and created new events to meet those needs. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lifelong ‘Star Trek’ Fan Leaves Behind a Massive Trove of Memorabilia

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      Troy Nelson and his younger brother Andrew were almost inseparable.The two youngest of six, they were born two years apart. They lived together in their childhood home in Bremerton, Wash., for more than half a century. Near their home, there is a park bench on which they carved their initials as young boys.The Nelson brothers never married or had children. They worked together at the same senior home. They even once, as teenagers, dated the same girl at the same time while working different shifts at the same pizza shop. This lasted a week until they realized it.“Two parts of one body,” Evan Browne, their older sister, said of their relationship in an interview.On Feb. 28, Andrew Nelson, who had been treated for cancer for years, went to feed the chickens and ducks that were gifts from Ms. Browne to her brothers. He had a heart attack and died. He was 55. Just hours later, Troy Nelson, who was stricken with grief, took his own life. He was 57.“He had talked about it before,” Browne, 66, said, tearfully. “He said, ‘Hey, if Andrew goes, I’m out of here. I’m checking out.’ Andrew would say the same thing, and then it really happened.”The collection of “Star Trek” memorabilia left by Mr. Nelson is among the largest known, according to the president of a nonprofit that focuses on the franchise.Connie Aramaki for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Woman Who Tried to Make Porn Safe for Feminism

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      How the archive of Candida Royalle, a porn star turned pioneering director, landed at Harvard — and inspired a new book challenging the conventional history of the sexual revolution.Harvard’s Schlesinger Library is the nation’s leading repository for women’s history, home to the papers of suffragists and social reformers, poets and politicians, the collective behind “Our Bodies, Ourselves” and iconic figures like Amelia Earhart, Angela Davis and Julia Child.But in its basement vaults, carefully preserved in a box, you can also find a rather different artifact: a costume from the 1978 pornographic comedy “Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls.”The movie, starring John C. Holmes as a pimp who oversees a prostitution ring masquerading as a pizza delivery service, was history-making in its own way, as one of the earliest examples of what became a classic trope — porn with pepperoni. But the costume is at the Schlesinger because of another name on the bill: Candida Royalle.Royalle, who died in 2015, was a minor celebrity in her day. She was a porn star from the 1970s golden age who moved to the other side of the camera, producing feminist erotica that focused on female fantasies, and female audiences.During the so-called sex wars of the 1980s, Royalle faced off against anti-porn feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, who dismissed women in the profession as stooges of the patriarchy. And in the 1990s, she became a godmother to the mediagenic sex-positive feminists riding feminism’s third wave.Today, Royalle’s name may ring few bells. But her voluminous archive is now housed at Harvard, where the trove of diaries, letters, photographs, scrapbooks, videos and memorabilia is opening up a new window onto the sexual revolution.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Guy Wildenstein, Art Family Patriarch, Found Guilty in Tax Trial

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      Mr. Wildenstein hid a prized art collection and other assets from French authorities to avoid paying millions in inheritance taxes, a Paris court ruled.Guy Wildenstein, the international art dealer, was found guilty in France on Tuesday of massive tax fraud, the latest twist after years of legal entanglements that have unraveled the secrecy that once surrounded his powerful family dynasty.Mr. Wildenstein, 78, the Franco-American patriarch of the family and president of Wildenstein & Co. in New York, was sentenced by the Paris Appeals Court to a four-year prison sentence, with half of it suspended, and the other half to be served under house arrest with an electronic bracelet. The court also sentenced him to pay a one million euro fine, or about $1.08 million.He stood accused of hiding significant chunks of his family’s art collection and other assets in a maze of trusts and shell companies when his father, Daniel, died in 2001, and after his brother, Alec, died in 2008.Prosecutors had said that he was trying to dodge hundreds of millions of euros in inheritance taxes. At the trial, which was held in the fall, they had requested a slightly more lenient prison sentence for Mr. Wildenstein, but they had also requested a much larger €250 million fine, or about $270 million.The Wildensteins, a family of French art dealers spanning five generations, were historically secretive about the exact details of their collection, which has included works by Caravaggio, Fragonard and many other blue-chip artists.Prosecutors said that the family was responsible for “the longest and most sophisticated tax fraud” in modern French history, by concealing art and other assets under complex foreign trusts and by shielding artworks worth millions of dollars in tax havens. By doing this, prosecutors said, the family grossly underestimated its enormous wealth when the time came to pay inheritance taxes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Neil Gaiman on the Collectibles He’s Auctioning

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      Art by Moebius, a Christmas card by Gaiman and a Swamp Thing cover are among the items.“I like the idea of spreading joy,” Neil Gaiman, the author of the Sandman series, said in an interview about why he is selling some of the original comic book art, toys and other collectibles he has amassed.During the dark days of pandemic lockdowns, buying art provided a particular comfort, he recalled. Works would arrive and he would “just kvell,” he said. He remembered buying a drawing of Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet in the snow, by the British artist E.H. Shepard. “If someone comes to the house, I say, ‘Come and look at this,’ if they are the right sort of person,” he said.He views art ownership as custodial. “It’s your job to keep it safe and hope the house doesn’t burn down while it is in your care,” he said. Then someone else can do the same, he said, and “hope their house doesn’t burn down.”Gaiman said he was inspired by his friend Geoffrey Notkin, of “Meteorite Men” on the Science Channel, who auctioned part of his collection of meteorites and donated some proceeds to charity.Gaiman will donate part of the auction proceeds to the Hero Initiative, which is an emergency fund for comics creators, and the Authors League Fund, which benefits writers in financial hardship; he will also give living artists whose work sells part of the proceeds. The items are on display at Heritage Auctions in Dallas, and bidding starts on Friday.More than 100 pieces are up for sale, and Gaiman pointed to some highlights. The author Neil Gaiman said he hopes others find joy in the memorabilia he is shedding.Rozette Rago for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More