It almost ended up in a trash bin. Instead, it hauled in some $44,800 (£33,390).
That’s the tale of a 500-year-old engraving by Albrecht Dürer that a British man named Mat Winter found in the back of a car at a “rubbish dump” when he was just 11 years old. He said he was drawn to the intricate detail of the work and asked the owner of the car if he could take it. She readily agreed.
Despite his admiration for the piece, which is titled Knight, Death and the Devil, signed, and dated 1513, Winter did not believe there was any substantial value in it.
“It’s got so much detail to it, and something told me that’s worth something but I never really knew what,” Winter said, according to a report by the BBC.
However, years later, he took it to Rare Book Auctions in Lichfield, England, where it was given a “guide price,” or pre-sale estimate, of $13,000 to $26,000 (£10,000 to £20,000).
Mat Winter holding Albrecht Durer’s Knight, Death and the Devil, (1513). Image courtesy Jim Spencer, Rare Book Auctions, Lichfield, United Kingdom.
The auction house’s director, Jim Spencer, told Artnet in an email that the engraving “was a huge honor to handle and catalogue for our inaugural sale.” He said he “knew immediately that it had to be from the hand of Dürer himself—nobody else could come close to that finesse with the burin,” a steel tool used in engraving, “but the research involved in proving this, as well as the comprehensive cataloguing required, was far more time-consuming.”
However, “the research is always the fun part,” Spencer said. While Dürer’s earlier woodcuts are superb, he said, his skill with the burin in these later engravings is almost superhuman. “The faint scratch across the horse’s head was the final proof I needed that this was an original and authentic print. This scratch would’ve been an almost imperceptible flaw to the surface of the copper plate, and it disappears in later impressions. Grabbing my magnifying glass and seeing that scratch made me catch my breath. For that fleeting moment, I was connected to Albrecht Dürer.”
The winning bidder was a private collector in Germany. “I guess you could say this German Renaissance print is going home,” Spencer told the BBC. It hammer price was £26,500, double its low estimate; the £33,390 final price includes buyer’s premium.
Dürer, who was born in 1471 in Nuremberg, in what is now Germany, was a major painter and printmaker who introduced Renaissance art to Germany and northern Europe.
According to the Artnet Price Database, the most ever paid at auction for a Dürer is $866,500, for a woodcut from 1515 called The Rhinoceros. It was sold at Christie’s New York in January 2013.
The second-highest price on record, according to the PDB, is just under $860,000 ($859, 383), for Adam und Eva, a copper engraving dated 1504 that was sold at Kornfeld Bern in Switzerland in September 2021.