A rare landscape by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Altdorfer will be offered at auction at Sotheby’s Old Masters Evening Sale in London on 9 December, with an estimated price of between £3m and £5m.
The painting of a thickly wooded landscape and a rainbow against a densely clouded sky, dating from around 1520, surfaced in a Swiss private collection. It was previously unknown to Altdorfer scholars and does not feature in the artist’s catalogue raisonné. It is one of only three known oil landscapes by Altdorfer, who is considered one of the first landscape artists. The other two are both in museums—one is in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek, and the other in London’s National Gallery.
“To add to the known body of work of one of the great masters of the Northern Renaissance is one of the most exciting discoveries imaginable in our field,” says George Gordon, the chairman of Sotheby’s Worldwide Old Masters Department.
The current owner of the painting inherited it from his father, who purchased it in 1957 from the collection of a noble Austrian family, the House of Harrach. Painted on parchment, it was later glued to a wooden panel support. It is the smallest of Altdorfer’s known landscapes. A distant castle perches on a rocky outcrop beyond the rain-wettened forest and undergrowth that dominates the painting, which is signed.
Altdorfer was born in 1480 in Regensburg in southern Germany, spent most of his career there, also working as a politician, and died in the city in 1538. His densely wooded landscapes are drawn from the mixed deciduous and evergreen forests either side of the Danube downstream from Regensburg, Gordon says.
He says it was difficult to give a price estimate for the painting because no Altdorfer work has been offered on the market since 1980, when the National Gallery paid the reported sum of £2.4m for Christ Taking Leave of His Mother (around 1520). It was one of the highest prices ever paid for a work of art at that time.
“We don’t really know what it’s worth because it’s many decades since an Altdorfer last came to the market,” Gordon says. “It could fetch more than our estimate. I think it’s quite likely that museums will be interested.”
Sotheby’s will exhibit the painting in New York from 7-19 November and in London from 4-9 December.