Previously Unknown Altdorfer Painting Heads to Sotheby’s With £5 Million Estimate

The latest:

A landscape by Albrecht Altdorfer that scholars had never recorded will be offered at Sotheby’s Old Masters Evening Sale in London on 9 December, carrying an estimate of £3m to £5m. The painting, dated to around 1520, emerged from a Swiss private collection and does not appear in the artist’s catalogue raisonné. George Gordon, chairman of Sotheby’s Worldwide Old Masters Department, called it one of the most exciting discoveries imaginable in the field.

Details:

• The work: The painting shows a thickly wooded landscape with a rainbow set against a densely clouded sky, a distant castle perched on a rocky outcrop beyond the rain-wettened forest that dominates the composition. According to Sotheby’s, it is signed, and it is the smallest of Altdorfer’s known landscapes.
• The rarity: Altdorfer is regarded as one of the first landscape artists, and Sotheby’s says this is only the third known oil landscape by him. The other two are both in public collections — one at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the other at the National Gallery in London — leaving none in private hands until now.
• The provenance: The current owner inherited the painting from his father, who bought it in 1957 from the collection of the House of Harrach, a noble Austrian family. The auction house has not named the current owner or disclosed how long the work remained in Switzerland before being identified.
• Material and condition: The landscape was painted on parchment and later glued to a wooden panel support, according to Sotheby’s. No details were released on whether the transfer affected the surface or on any conservation work carried out ahead of the sale.
• Pricing difficulty: Gordon said setting an estimate was difficult because no Altdorfer has been offered since 1980, when the National Gallery paid a reported £2.4m for Christ Taking Leave of His Mother, dated around 1520 — then among the highest sums ever paid for a work of art.
• The expectation: Gordon said the house does not really know what the painting is worth given the decades since an Altdorfer last came to market, adding that it could exceed the estimate and that museums are quite likely to be interested. He did not identify any institution that has expressed interest.
• The artist: Altdorfer was born in Regensburg in southern Germany in 1480, spent most of his career there while also working as a politician, and died in the city in 1538. Gordon said his densely wooded scenes draw on the forests flanking the Danube downstream from Regensburg.
• The schedule: Sotheby’s will show the painting publicly in New York from 7 to 19 November, then in London from 4 to 9 December, immediately before the evening sale. The house has not said whether further viewings are planned elsewhere.

Background:

Altdorfer belonged to the Danube School, a circle of early 16th-century artists in southern Germany and Austria who treated landscape as a subject in its own right rather than a backdrop. Works attributed to him rarely leave museum collections.

Between the lines:

The estimate carries unusual uncertainty by Sotheby’s own account: with the last Altdorfer sold 45 years ago and the other two known oil landscapes held by museums, there is no recent comparable to price against. Gordon’s expectation of museum interest points to the likeliest buyers — institutions that already hold the only competing examples.

What’s next

The London viewing opens 4 December ahead of the 9 December evening sale, when the hammer price will test whether the £3m-£5m estimate underpriced a work with no modern market precedent.