A suicide machine belonging to Dr Jack Kevorkian was withdrawn from an auction of the assisted-suicide advocate’s possessions after failing to draw a high enough bid.

And 17 of his paintings tied up in a legal dispute with a suburban Boston museum found no takers.

The paintings, including one Dr Kevorkian did with a pint of his blood, and about 100 other personal items went on sale at the New York Institute of Technology. The estate had estimated the value of the 17 paintings at between €1.7 and €2.4m.

Images of the paintings were displayed instead of the actual works because the Armenian Library and Museum of America has refused to surrender them.

Roger Neal, a spokesman for the Kevorkian estate, said he was not surprised the paintings did not sell.

“I’m not sure how many people wanted to bid on artwork that was in litigation,” he said.

The suicide machine had been estimated to sell for between €70,765 and €141,131, but the highest bid was €45,581, said Mr Neal’s colleague Lester Schecter.

“People just didn’t bid on the big stuff,” he said.

The assisted-suicide machine, known as a Thanatron, delivers intravenous drugs that put the person to sleep and then stops the heart. It was built out of household tools, toy parts, magnets and electrical switches.

Dr Kevorkian sparked the national right-to-die debate with a home-made suicide machine that helped end the lives of about 130 ailing people.

He was convicted of second-degree murder in 1999 for assisting in the 1998 death of a Michigan man with Lou Gehrig’s disease and was released from prison in 2007.

He died in June aged 83, leaving his property to his niece and sole heir, Ava Janus, of Troy, Michigan.