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# Unpublished Illustrations for "Harry Potter" by the Now-Legendary Artist Mary GrandPré
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/neopublikovannye-illiustratsii-k-garri-potteru-ot-stavshei-legendarnoi-khudozhnitsy-meri-grandpre/
- Published: 2026-04-19T14:47:35.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:26:16.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Art, Books, People, Pop Culture

Mary GrandPré was offered the illustration of the first Harry Potter book in the late 1990s by an editor at Scholastic, and at first she declined: her schedule simply would not allow so large a project. The editor nevertheless talked her round, and by the third book, in her own words, she understood that she was dealing with something truly special.

Over the seven books she produced more than 90 interior illustrations, plus the covers. All of them were made by hand, without a computer, chiefly in pastel and watercolour. For the last book, *Deathly Hallows*, she switched to pastel on toned paper, and dressed the chapters with black-and-white charcoal drawings.

GrandPré was among the few who read the manuscripts before publication. She read each book once, from cover to cover, marking the scenes that would lend themselves well to illustration, then made sketches and sent the variants to the editors. With Rowling herself she did not collaborate at all. The illustrations grew out of her own reading of the text.

She also designed the series logo, with the lightning-bolt "P" in the word Potter, and this lettering became a global standard, migrating into the films and the merchandising.

Besides the published illustrations, there exists a body of unpublished work, including full-colour scenes that never made it into the editions: the Christmas feast at Hogwarts, Hagrid buying Hedwig, the Mirror of Erised, a Quidditch match. They surface from time to time in exhibitions and galleries, and it is precisely these works that collectors prize above all.

In 2000 she made the single exception to her rule of accepting no private Potter commissions: she created original colour illustrations for 25 copies of *The Goblet of Fire*, which are now considered rare collectors' items.

Amusingly, in *The Order of the Phoenix* she drew Snape as a balding man with a goatee, although throughout the text he is described as a man with greasy, shoulder-length hair. And the editors let this slip through.

GrandPré's illustrations for Rowling's series appeared on the cover of Time, and the artist herself says that her style was influenced by the stained glass of the church she attended as a child: "There was something glowing from within, and that light sometimes seeps into my work, whether I want it to or not." After Potter she received a Caldecott nomination in 2015 for her illustrations to a children's book about Kandinsky, took part in designing characters for *Ice Age*, and worked with The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal. During the pandemic she sewed monkeys out of socks and sold them in aid of relief funds.

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