A signed photo of Graham Greene has been sold for 10 times its original estimate at an auction at Bonhams.
The photo taken by Yousuf Karsh ? famous for his portraits of Winston Churchill in the 1940s – was sold for £20,400 to an anonymous telephone bidder, far exceeding its lower estimate of £2000.
The photo was one of 300 images from a collection compiled by Roy Davids. ?Creative Encounters: Portraits of Writers, Artists and Musicians? was the first sale entirely devoted to portraits at an international auction house, raising over half a million pounds.
A pen and ink sketch by Sylvia Plath of Ted Hughes sold for £27,600, and a charcoal and chalk portrait of Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Charles Robert Leslie raised £31,200. The top lot was a portrait of T S Eliot by Sir Gerald Kelly, raising £50,400.