The Snow Queen by Edmund Dulac sold for $100,000 (£75,190) at Swann.
Signed and dated 1910, it was one of those he made for the story of ‘The Snow Queen’.
As the caption to the plate in that book explains: “Many a Winter’s night she flies through the streets and peeps in at the windows and then the ice freezes on the panes into wonderful patterns like flowers.”
Though exhibited at the time in London’s Leicester Galleries, Dulac’s original artwork seems to have spent much of its life in the US. It has made two previous auction appearances at Christie’s New York, in 1985 and 1994, but it was in a Swann (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) sale of December 16 that it doubled expectations to sell at $100,000 (£75,190).
