Robert McGinnis valuation
Painted the Bond posters, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and well over a thousand paperback covers.
Robert McGinnis was born in Ohio in 1926 and spent a career in American commercial illustration of a length and productivity that is now almost unimaginable — over a thousand paperback covers, and film posters including Breakfast at Tiffany's and several of the early James Bond films.
What a work by Robert McGinnis is worth
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Bio
Robert McGinnis was born in Ohio in 1926 and spent a career in American commercial illustration of a length and productivity that is now almost unimaginable — over a thousand paperback covers, and film posters including Breakfast at Tiffany's and several of the early James Bond films. The style is instantly legible: long-limbed women, confident line, a poster-maker's sense of how to carry an image at a distance.
This market turns entirely on what an object is. Original painted artwork for a cover or poster is scarce, valuable and frequently undocumented, having been treated as disposable studio property at the time. Below that sit signed later editions and giclée reproductions issued in quantity, and printed ephemera — the books and posters themselves — which is a collecting field of its own at quite different money. Establishing which of the three is in front of us comes before any figure, and original artwork needs provenance.
Disney, Dell and Breakfast at Tiffany's
McGinnis was born in Cincinnati and raised in Wyoming, Ohio, and a high school teacher found him an apprenticeship at the Walt Disney Studios in California. After the war he drew mattress and television advertisements for a Cincinnati studio, and a meeting with the illustrator Coby Whitmore led him to move to New York in 1953.
A chance meeting with Mitchell Hooks in 1958 brought him to Dell Publishing and the paperback covers, more than 1,200 in all; Breakfast at Tiffany's was the first of more than forty film posters. He was elected to the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame, and he died at his home in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, in March 2025, aged 99.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
