The £10,000 original cover artwork for a Rupert the Bear annual from 1961 highlights a colorful display of illustrations on sale at The Cotswolds Decorative Antiques & Fine Art Fair at Westonbirt School, near Tetbury, Gloucestershire from March 27-29. The painting forms part of a collection on display at this popular spring event in the United Kingdom.
This and others will be familiar to anyone who once enjoyed the Rupert the Bear annuals and cartoon strips, stories of King Arthur, the Chronicles of Narnia, The Jungle Book, The Wind in the Willows, The Golden Compass and The Little Mermaid. “People love the nostalgia of childhood and these illustrations always bring back memories,” says Mike Emeny from ‘Art of the Imagination’, art dealers from Salisbury. Particularly eye-catching will be the original cover artwork for the Rupert Annual 1961, by artist Alfred Bestall, reports artfixdaily.com
Painted in water colors and ink, it is on sale for £10,000. The prices for original drawings of Winnie the Pooh are now valued at tens of thousands of pounds when less than a decade ago a pen and ink drawing could be bought for a few hundred pounds. Another Rupert illustration, a pen and ink drawing by Mary Tourtel for ‘Rupert and the Little Prince’, published in 1930, signed by the artist, is priced at £1,450. Also eye-catching will be a rare work by the highly collected artist Arthur Rackham.
The original colored illustration for Legends of King Arthur, a signed work dating from 1902 is on sale for £14,000. More affordable will be a number of original prints at £165 each of an illustration for Wind in the Willows by the contemporary artist Angel Dominguez. The original painting for this print will also be on sale - shown here with Mike Emeny.
