The little man with the golden muffler, as described by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in his book, is still as popular as ever, even after eighty years. A watercolor depicting the Little Prince conversing with a snake, measuring 275 x 215 mm and produced on Fidelity Onion Skin American paper, was recently sold at Christie's auction on December 14 for 350,000 euros, ten times the initial estimate.
This watercolor was used for the original edition of the philosophical tale published by Reynal & Hitchcok on April 6, 1943. Described as " of great interest and extremely rare" by Christie's, this drawing by Saint-Exupéry appears in chapter XVII of the book when The Little Prince visiting his seventh planet, Earth, falls in Africa and discovers " a strange beast, thin as a finger" who always speaks in riddles: the snake.
The writer-aviator, already known for his books such as Courrier Sud , Night Flight and Terre des Hommes published respectively in 1929, 1931, 1939 had responded with the writing of Little Prince to a commission from his American publisher for a Christmas story. And it was only natural that the disheveled-haired character Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who had been drawing all over the place for years, should illustrate the book.
The Little Prince is the best-selling book in the world after the Bible, with sales of over 150 million copies, thousands of editions and hundreds of translations. The book was first published in France in 1946 by Gallimard. But the illustrations in the book are only reproductions of the plates in the American version.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in The Little Prince : "It's hard to get back into drawing, at my age, when you've never tried anything other than a closed boa and an open boa, at the age of sixâeuros! I will, of course, try to make my portraits as close to the original as possible. But I'm not entirely sure I'll succeed.â Had he known that eighty years later...
