Blake Paintings Fetch Five-Spot

A small collection of watercolors by William Blake has fetched £5 million at auction in the UK, the most money ever paid for a work by the British poet and artist. The paintings were commissioned to accompany Robert Blair’s poem “The Grave,” and while the fact of their existence was known to scholars, they had been missing since 1836. Two Yorkshire dealers discovered the paintings in a Glasgow bookshop last year, and acquired them without telling the bookstore of their significance. A bit of legal wrangling followed, and the upshot is that this week’s auction will leave both the dealers and the shop quite a bit richer.