A rare Altdorfer landscape goes to auction in London

A landscape that Altdorfer scholars never knew about is heading to auction, with an estimate of up to £5 million. Albrecht Altdorfer was born in Regensburg in 1480 and died there in 1538. The painting surfaced in a Swiss private collection.

Its title is A thickly wooded landscape with a rainbow behind the trees and a distant outcrop to the right beneath a cloud-laden sky. Dated to around 1520, it is signed. Dense woods fill the scene, with a rainbow behind the trees and a castle on a distant rocky outcrop. Altdorfer painted it on parchment, later glued to a wooden panel. It is also the smallest of Altdorfer's known landscapes.

The work is also absent from the artist's catalogue raisonné (the full scholarly list of an artist's works).

The context

Only three oil landscapes by Altdorfer are known, and this is one. Munich's Alte Pinakothek and the National Gallery in London hold the other two. London's picture, Landscape with a Footbridge, dates from about 1518 to 1520 and was bought in 1961. Like the new find, it is painted on parchment and mounted on wood. Room 64 is its listed home.

The scene is probably an impression of the Danube valley, not a real place, the gallery says. Altdorfer lived in that valley. That fits the rise of landscape as a subject in its own right in the early 1500s. Sotheby's calls the new find one of the earliest landscapes in Western art history to make an auction debut. Its release is dated 5 November.

No Altdorfer work has been offered on the market since 1980, The Art Newspaper reports. That was the year the National Gallery paid a reported £2.4 million for Christ Taking Leave of His Mother, from around 1520. George Gordon, chairman of Sotheby's Worldwide Old Masters Department, called the new find one of the most exciting discoveries imaginable in the field. Gordon added that it could fetch more than the estimate. Museums are likely to be interested, he said.

The current owner inherited the painting from their father. The father bought it in 1957 from the collection of the House of Harrach, a noble Austrian family.

How to see it

The house will show the painting in New York from 7 to 19 November. London viewing runs from 4 to 9 December. The sale itself is the Old Masters Evening Sale in London on 9 December, with the estimate at £3 million to £5 million.

Our view

We think the sale shows how much art history still sits in private collections. Even the house's own expert says the price could pass the estimate, so the figure is a guess, not a rule.

My piggy bank has looked at the estimate and quietly left the room.

Would you visit?