LONDON.- Albrecht Altdorfer is widely considered the first landscape painter in the modern sense. Unlike contemporaries who only used nature as a backdrop for their religious or mythological figures, for Altdorfer the forest was also a rich subject in its own right.

"The first independent landscapes in the history of European art were painted by Albrecht Altdorfer" -- Professor Christopher Wood, Academic & Scholar of Altdorfer¹

Until the discovery of this painting earlier this year, only two pure landscape oil paintings by him were known: one in the National Gallery in London and one in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. The appearance of this thickly wooded landscape, densely painted on a parchment measuring some 23 by 20 centimetres, marks a historic moment. This is the first time a work recognised as by the artist is to be offered on the market since 1980, when Christ Taking Leave of His Mother was acquired privately by the National Gallery for a reported sum of £2.45 million (one of the highest prices ever paid for a work of art at the time).

This atmospheric work is the smallest and most densely vegetated of Altdorfer's pure landscapes of any media. Beyond its dense trees and mossy undergrowth, the most enthralling characteristic is a rainbow that arches behind the evergreens, denoting the idea that it has just rained. The ultimate source of illumination is the sun, barely hinted at by a brief lightening of the sky in the clouds. The three known works are all distinct meteorologically - the National Gallery work is set in full daylight, and the Alte Pinakothek painting is bathed in a warm evening light.

The painting was acquired by the father of the owner in 1957, prior to which it had been in the aristocratic collection of Counts of Harrach at the baroque Palais Harrach in Vienna. It will now be making its auction debut - the first painting by the artist to have been offered at auction in several generations.

A thickly wooded landscape with a rainbow behind the trees and a distant outcrop to the right beneath a cloud-laden sky, dating from circa 1520, will be offered with an estimate of £3 - 5 million, as part of Sotheby's Old Masters Evening Sale on 9 December. It will first be exhibited to the public at Sotheby's New York from 7-19 November, followed by Sotheby's London from 4-9 December.

Altdorfer was born and died in Regensburg, an ancient city known to the Romans as Ratisbon, situated on the Danube between Munich and Nuremberg. A journey south into the Alps around 1511 provided him with a visual repertoire of mountainous landscapes and seemingly limitless panoramas that bore fruit in later paintings, most notably in his most famous work, The Battle of Alexander at Issus (painted in 1529 for Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria, and now the most celebrated painting in the Alte Pinakothek). From 1513 he was in the service of the Emperor Maximilian I in Innsbruck, but amid the turmoil of the Reformation he retreated to his home city, and remained there for the remainder of his life, enjoying a measure of prosperity and practicing architecture as well as painting, drawing and print making.

After Albrecht Dürer, Altdorfer is the most renowned of the German Renaissance painters. Most recently, in 2021, the Musée du Louvre hosted an exhibition dedicated to the artist, organised in close collaboration with the Albertina Museum in Vienna.

"It was the outstanding achievement of Albrecht Altdorfer, in particular, to make the forest itself the natural protagonist." -- Sir Simon Schama, Professor of Art History²



¹ Christopher S. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape, London 1993.

² Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, London 1995 (2004 ed.).