By: JESSICA RHOADES
Staff Writer
Freddie Mercury’s extensive collection of costumes, fine art, and even handwritten working lyrics for “We Are the Champions” and “Killer Queen” will be auctioned in September.
Queen’s frontman had said he wanted to live a Victorian life surrounded by “exquisite clutter,” and he left it all to his close friend, Mary Austin, when he died, at 45, of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1991.
Austin, who has kept most of it the way Mercury left it in his home in the upscale Kensington neighborhood of London, said she had reached the “difficult decision” that it was time to sell it all, Sotheby’s said.
Artwork includes prints or works on paper by Picasso and Matisse. “Type of Beauty,” a painting by 19th-century French artist James Tissot of his Irish muse and lover Kathleen Newton, is estimated to sell for 400,000 to 600,000 pounds ($500,000-750,000) — the highest of any item listed in press materials.
Lyrics for the band’s show-closing anthemic number “We are the Champions” that Mercury wrote on nine pages, including stationery from British Midland Airways, are estimated to fetch 200,000 to 300,000 pounds ($250,000-375,000).