Rare Tintin painting sells in Paris for record €3.2 mln

A Paris auction house sold an original painting made for the 1936 Tintin comic book "The Blue Lotus." The small Herge artwork fetched more than €3 million.

Jean- Paul Casterman was seven years old when he received a piece of paper with a drawing on it. The child folded the small watercolor of a youngster and his dog hiding from a dragon in a gigantic Chinese vase and put it in a drawer, where it languished for decades.

The man who gave little JeanPaul the gift was none other than Georges Remi, better known as Herge. The boy's father, Louis Casterman, headed the publishing house that published the Belgian illustrator's worldfamous comics about the adventures of a young reporter called Tintin and his dog, Snowy.

The drawing was an early version for the cover of the 1936 The

Blue Lotus. The editor rejected it, arguing that the multi-colored drawing was too expensive to print.

On Thursday, the 34 x 34

centimeter (13 x 13 inch) drawing went on sale at the Artcurial auction house in Paris — and fetched €3.2 million ($ 3.9 million).

Tintin and Snowy in China Herge was a perfectionist and a visionary — and the 1936 volume of the Tintinseries has a special place in Herge's artistic cosmos as it marks the illustrator's opening up to foreign cultures: in this case, to Chinese culture.

Herge studied the country's culture and history for The Blue Lotus to create a greater sense of realism, said Eric Leroy, a comics expert at the Artcurial auction house, based in Paris. "With stark colors, the eye contact between Tintin and the dragon captivates us," he told DW, adding that Tintin's faithful dog, Snowy, is also pictured. "Herge wanted us to feel the mysterious side of the story that is told in the framework of Chinese culture."

The Blue Lotus — groundbreaking work

This work is an iconic comic image, "one of the most famous of the 20th century," says Leroy.

It is the second time Artcurial is auctioning a work from the Tintin universe. Herge's cover for the 1932 Tintin in America went under the hammer in 2012 for €1.2 million ($1.5 million) — a record sum for a francophone comic artist at the time. Just a few years later, in the summer of 2020, a few other Herge comic album covers achieved top prices.

Herge's widow has meanwhile said her husband by no means meant to give away that precious painting — and would like the work returned to her.

However, "the sellers are the rightful owners of the work. They are the heirs of Jean-Paul Casterman," Leroy says, adding that the widow's claims of ownership are mere assertions that have no legal basis.

Record prices for comic art

Original works by comics and fantasy artists have long fetched high prices at auctions; covers for fantasy magazines by artists such as Frank Frazetta have recently sold for several million dollars. In 2019, a Frazetta cover painting depicting an Egyptian queen changed hands for $5.4 million at a Chicago auction. "Buyer interest depends on the quality of the pieces. The market is strong, especially for increasingly rare copies," says comics expert Leroy.

Such elaborate works rarely find their way into museums, however. "The true home of 'The Blue Lotus' is the Musee Herge," the museum's director, Nick Rodwell, told French paper Le Monde. "But public collections can't keep up with those astronomical sums."

sung by sailors at work. Among them, "Drunken Sailor" is probably the best-known shanty in the historical repertoire. They were particularly popular in the 19th century, before steam-powered ships replaced sailing vessels.

The call-and-response songs were led by one of the sailors, known as the shantyman, and the rest of the crew would join him in the chorus, in the style of these TikTok contributors who lovingly added their voices to Evans' initial cover:

The "Wellerman" in the song refers to an Australian shorewhaling company called The Weller Bros, which mainly ran its operations along the coast of New Zealand from 1830 to 1840. In the song, the Wellerman is the supply ship that is expected to be sent by the company.

As the chorus goes: "Soon may the Wellerman come / To bring us sugar and tea and rum. / One day, when the tonguin' is done / We'll take our leave and go."

Tonguing was the name given to the work of the tonguers, who were in charge of butchering the whale after it had been caught.

Hoping for freedom

But knowing the meaning of the term was not essential to turn the song into a viral hit.

In a way, it reflects our collective hope to soon be freed from captivity in a locked-down world, whenever the tonguin' — or rather the pandemic — is over.

With this song, TikTok's video format, which allows users to keep a visual reference to the initial clip, also reproduces the appearance of many of our social interactions over the past year — those countless video conferences and calls with colleagues and relatives.

Variations on a theme

Different compilations of the various additions to this "massive earworm" have been created, such as this one by Twitter user Echo Alfa Bravo:

Even Kermit the frog has joined in on the trend:

And it has since been remixed with various beats:

'2021 is the year of the sea shanty'

Even those who were initially skeptical about "Wellerman" have decided that the singer was "kinda lit":

Science journalist Leigh Cowart offered her interpretation as to why sea shanties are popular right now: "behavioral synchrony feels really, really good to humans and many of us have been social distancing for months and deprived of this," she tweeted.

Beyond the social isolation caused by the pandemic, the 200-year-old song also feels particularly soothing amid the US Capitol rampage and Donald Trump's second impeachment, a feeling expressed by the famous "This is fine" meme: