Ink drawing by Ernest Shephard – £65,000 at Sotheby’s.
Doubly and faintly captioned in pencil ‘Winnie the Pooh finds a tail’ and ‘Christopher Robin had nailed it on’, the drawing is also signed with the illustrator’s full initials, EHS, in the lower right corner.
It is an illustration that features in the chapter of AA Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh of 1926 that is titled ‘In which Eeyore loses a tail and Pooh finds one’, as were a now framed set of four small drawings by Shepard also on offer that show Eeyore looking anxiously around, behind and under his body from all possible angles for that missing tail.
But it all ended well, for as fans will know, “...when Christopher Robin had nailed it on in its right place again, Eeyore frisked about the forest...”.
That set of drawings was sold at £55,000 by Sotheby’s.
