A 500-year-old engraving by the Northern Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer that was rescued from a garbage dump is up for auction and could fetch up to $26,000.
As a boy, Mat Winter was fond of rummaging around the local dump in Kent, southeast England, and looking for antiques. According to Winter, one afternoon he found an old print and, liking the look of it, he took it home. It has been tucked away in a cupboard along with the rest of his salvaged antiques for more than a decade.
Earlier this year, on a whim, Winter sent the print to be assessed by Rare Book Auctions, a relatively new auction house in Staffordshire, in the West Midlands of England. There, the parcel sat on a shelf for months before the director, Jim Spencer, took a look. “When the vendor said it had been rescued from a tip, I didn’t expect much,” Spencer said via email. “But when I saw the print, the quality was exceptional and I was straight on a train to the British Museum.”
Detail from Albrecht Dürer, Knight, Death and the Devil (1513). Courtesy: Rare Book Auctions.
Spencer had seen many prints that imitated the 16th-century German artist, but never one by Dürer himself—outside of a museum, at least. Still, the print was promising. The paper’s texture was right for the period, he said, and the “level of detail was breathtaking.” Through an appointment with the British Museum’s prints and drawings experts, Spencer hoped to determine not only if the print was by Dürer, but if it was an early and therefore more valuable example.
By comparing the print with the three in the British Museum’s collection, Spencer was able to confirm the work was Knight, Death and the Devil (1513) and was one of Dürer’s three Meisterstiche, or master prints. The key detail that proved the case was an incredibly faint scratch across the head of the knight’s horse, a mistake that was accidentally traced across the copper plate before printing; it disappears only in later prints.
Detail from Albrecht Dürer, Knight, Death and the Devil (1513). Courtesy: Rare Book Auctions.
It’s believed the print comes from sometime in the middle of the plate’s life and was pasted down onto its current mount around 1900. An excellent, unmounted early print of Knight, Death and the Devil, Spencer said, can draw prices around £200,000 ($260,000).
“As evidenced by the extraordinary quality of this piece, Dürer notably revolutionized the woodcut process,” Spencer said. “His skill with a burin was awe-inspiring.”
The online auction runs until September 18.