The inimitable Daniel Grant has a nice piece in the Wall Street Journal detailing the rising value of famous illustrator’s work and Heritage Auctioneers’s role in that market:

Todd Hignite, who heads illustration-art sales at Dallas-based Heritage Auctioneers & Galleries Inc., says his gallery’s sales of illustration art have averaged just over $10 million in the past two years, up from $4.4 million in 2008. Along the way, Heritage has set auction records for a number of illustrators, including Howard Chandler Christy ($179,250 for his 1946 oil “Nymphs in Summer”), Maurice Sendak ($74,690 for a watercolor backdrop landscape for his book “Where the Wild Things Are”) and Garth Williams ($155,350 for his cover art to E.B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web”).

Beyond Norman Rockwell (Wall Street Journal)