Rare Renaissance masterpiece hidden for 70 years could fetch £5m at auction

Exclusive: Experts say Albrecht Altdorfer’s 1520 landscape is ‘one of the most exciting discoveries imaginable’

An exceptionally rare painting, described as one of the earliest landscapes in western art, goes on auction in London next month.

It was completed around 1520 by Albrecht Altdorfer, who is widely regarded as Europe’s first pure landscape oil artist.

The Renaissance artwork – A Thickly Wooded Landscape With a Rainbow Behind the Trees and a Distant Outcrop to the Right Beneath a Cloud-Laden Sky – has not been seen in public for 70 years because it was held in a private Swiss collection.

It will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s on 9 December for an estimated £3m to £5m – the first time a known work by the artist has come up for sale since 1980. George Gordon, the co-chair of Sotheby’s worldwide old masters department, said it was “one of the most exciting discoveries imaginable in our field”.

Before it was identified earlier this year, only two other pure landscape oil paintings by Altdorfer were known: Landscape With a Footbridge, currently displayed at the National Gallery in London, and Landscape of the Danube near Regensburg, housed in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.

The painting was acquired by the father of the owner in 1957 after being held in the aristocratic collection of the counts of Harrach at the Palais Harrach in Vienna.

Gordon said the painting, which measures about 23cm by 20cm, emanated an “intense mood that transcends its scale”. He added: “It’s a thick wooded landscape, there are no people, it’s densely wooded – and yet there is a sky above it and you can see that beyond through the clouds. There is a sun, but the sun is really struggling to make its presence felt, and then you have a rainbow which has caught light from the sun.”

The emergence of the painting is considered a major moment in the art world, with the last auctioned Altdorfer piece being one of the most expensive sales of its time. The 1520 painting, Christ Taking Leave of His Mother, was acquired privately by the National Gallery for a reported £2.45m in 1980.

Gordon said: “After [Albrecht] Dürer, and possibly Lucas Cranach the Elder, who had a rather different reputation, [Altdorfer] is the most significant German Renaissance artist.”

Born in 1480 in Regensburg, Bavaria, Altdorfer’s earliest signed works were drawings and engravings. Inspired by a trip south into the Alps, he then pivoted to depicting natural scenery in landscape paintings around 1511.

Gordon said: “The sculptors of that area of Germany in the previous century and into the 16th century and out of their own time incorporated vegetable motifs, ie trees, vines, etc into their sculptures. And Altdorfer did something similar with painting, but his forms, when he paints figures, they’re exaggerated and expressive and wild.”

Altdorfer landed commissions from royalty, including one for The Battle of Alexander at Issus, which was painted in 1529 for Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria and is now in the Alte Pinakothek.

From 1513, he was in the service of Emperor Maximilian I in Innsbruck, but during the Reformation he returned to Regensburg, where he died in 1538.

The Louvre hosted a major exhibition dedicated to his work – Albrecht Altdorfer: A German Renaissance Master – from October 2020 to January 2021.

Before the sale, the piece will go on show at Sotheby’s New York from Saturday until 19 November, followed by Sotheby’s London from 4 to 9 December.

Gordon said the painting felt “as modern and immediate as it would have appeared to those seeing it when it was first painted. Painted in oil on vellum, it is a work that transcends categorisation”.