Rare Tintin drawings snapped up
TWO rarely seen drawings of Tintin from the comic book album The Red Sea Sharks sold for $422 000 (R5.35-million) on Saturday in Dallas, Texas, the auction house selling the sketches said.
A pencil-on-paper 35.2x50cm design and a 30.7x47.7cm India ink copy, drawn by the Belgian cartoonist known as Herge in 1957, however fell short of the estimated price of between $720 000 and $960 000 (R9.1- to R12.1-million).
Heritage Auctions’ spokesman Eric Bradley said the set had been bought by a Brussels-based collector who did not want to be identified.
Herge, whose real name was Georges Remi, was from Brussels, a city which also plays home to Tintin and often forms the initial backdrop to his adventures.
Although Saturday’s auction was held in Texas, it was livestreamed at various locations including at Heritage Auction’s Dutch headquarters outside Utrecht.
The two drawings depict Page 58 of the intrepid boy reporter’s adventures in the 19th album by Herge, known as Coke en stock in French and published in 1958.
Original Herge drawings rarely appear on the open market as the artist did not have to sell his original artworks, but occasionally gave them away to close friends as gifts, Heritage Auctions said in a statement.
Herge gave the set on auction on Saturday to a Scandinavian friend in the 1970s who later sold it to a buyer “in a German-speaking part of Europe”, Brussels-based comic art expert Eric Verhoest said. – AFP