David Walliams to sell off personal collection of book illustrations
He is the Little Britain comedian who became one of the UK’s top children’s authors, selling more than 50 million books worldwide. Now David Walliams is offering fans the chance to buy the original illustrations that brought to life his beloved, eccentric characters, including Mr Stink by Sir Quentin Blake and Gangsta Granny and Woolly Mammoth by Tony Ross.
Original images created by Sir Quentin and Michael Foreman for Roald Dahl’s classic stories are also among more than 100 illustrations from Walliams’s personal collection, which are now being offered for sale by the Chris Beetles Gallery in St James’s, London.
A further 300 of Ross’s illustrations will feature in a major selling exhibition planned for this autumn.
Walliams is currently immersed in writing his next book and Mr Beetles has yet to ask him why he is selling the collection, but he was told by an associate that there is “a change of direction, change of taste”.
He first found fame with Little Britain, the sketch show he co-created with Matt Lucas.
Walliams’s collaborations with Ross - considered one of the world’s most popular children’s book illustrators - include The Ice Monster, about a 10-year-old orphan and a 10,000-year-old mammoth, as well as The World’s Worst Teachers and The World’s Worst Parents. His publishers, HarperCollins, note that his books have non-consecutively spent 76 weeks at number one in the overall book charts and more than 200 weeks at number one in the children’s charts – “an achievement no other children’s writer has reached”.
The Chris Beetles Gallery holds extensive collections of original artwork by great British illustrators, including Arthur Rackham, William Heath Robinson and EH Shepard. It is also the exclusive representative of Matt of The Daily Telegraph.
Mr Beetles said of Ross’s illustrations: “These have been bought directly from Ross [by] David Walliams as he’s done each book.”
He added: “He’s a good draughtsman first of all. But they’re lively, distinctive, quirky, funny, charming. Adults can see the work objectively, but kids are delighted by him. He dances before their eyes.”
The chance to buy the illustrations will no doubt excite fans as such images are rarely available, not least because the artist donated a vast archive of his work to Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children’s Books, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Sir Quentin’s Dahl illustrations include Sophie and The BFG and Willy Wonka, priced at £27,500 and £8,500 respectively, as well as “Mr Stink sat on an upturned plant pot in the shed as the two girls fussed around him”, created for Walliams’s Mr Stink, about a smelly man and a girl who befriends him, priced at £6,500.
