“… Base’s decision to sell his original work is unusual, says David Hulme, Sydney-based art valuer with fine art consultants Banziger Hulme. Most illustrators hang on to their artwork, and exhibit other work created specifically for the fine art market. He says illustrative work tends to have a far lower value than other works on paper. “I recently valued some illustrations for a regional art gallery and they weren’t as pure, they didn’t have a fine art component,” Hulme says. “Nobody in the fine art world will look at illustration in the same way as fine art.”
Hulme makes a distinction between straightforward commercial work for advertising or editorial, and illustration work for books. Norman Lindsay, he says, is a case in point. A Lindsay illustration will sell for about $2000, but a non-commercial watercolour will fetch $50,000. The illustrations for his children’s book The Magic Pudding are in a different league. As an artist and author with an established reputation, the book was published in 1918 as a limited edition for the relatively high price of pound stg. 1 10 shillings. The original art work is now in the State Library of NSW. …”