Freddie Mercury's estate will auction hundreds of personal items belonging to the late Queen singer — including handwritten notes, song drafts, and costumes
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- Hundreds of items owned by Queen singer Freddie Mercury will be auctioned later this year.
- They will be displayed at Sotheby's locations across the globe before being sold in September.
- The auctions will include art he owned, along with notes, drafts of Queen songs, and costumes worn for concerts.
Queen fans will be able to bid on handwritten notes, song drafts, costumes, and paintings once owned by Freddie Mercury when a collection of hundreds of personal items from the late music icon's estate are auctioned later this year.
The collections will be on display at Sotheby's locations around the world this summer in New York, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong before they are officially auctioned in London in September.
One piece already on display at Sotheby's in London is a robe and crown worn by Mercury during Queen's final performances in 1986. The auction house estimates the pair will go for between £60,000-80,000, the equivalent of about $75,000 to $100,000.
Kin Cheung/The Associated Press
Mary Austin, Mercury's longtime friend and inheritor of his estate and belongings, made the "difficult decision" to sell the items, according to The Associated Press. Many of the items have been stored in Mercury's Garden Lodge home where she has lived since his death in 1991.
"It was important to me to do this in a way that I felt Freddie would have loved, and there was nothing he loved more than an auction," Austin said in a statement. "Freddie was an incredible and intelligent collector who showed us that there is beauty and fun and conversation to be found in everything."
Some of the art includes works by Pablo Picasso and James Tissot, which Sotheby's estimates could sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, the AP reported.
Some of the other most expensive estimates are for pages of lyrics and notes for the iconic songs "We Are the Champions" and "Killer Queen." The entire collection is estimated to sell for over $7 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Sotheby's did not immediately respond to Insider's request to comment.