LONDON (AP) — Auctioneer Sotheby’s has sold work by artists great and mediocre, famous and obscure — and now, by an artist who never existed.

The London auction house said Monday it is offering a drawing by the talented but fictional American abstract expressionist Nat Tate.

Tate is the creation of British novelist William Boyd, who wrote a fictional biography that included reproductions of the artist’s drawings. It was published in 1998 complete with endorsements from David Bowie and Gore Vidal, who were in on the joke.