Albrecht Dürer valuation
Painter, draughtsman and the greatest printmaker of the Northern Renaissance, from the Apocalypse woodcuts to Melencolia I.
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was born in Nuremberg, the son of a goldsmith, and trained with the painter Michael Wolgemut.
What a work by Albrecht Dürer is worth
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Bio
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was born in Nuremberg, the son of a goldsmith, and trained with the painter Michael Wolgemut. He travelled to Italy in the mid-1490s and again in 1505–07, absorbed the art of the Italian Renaissance and brought its ideas of proportion and perspective north. In 1498 he published the fifteen woodcuts of the Apocalypse, and in 1513–14 engraved his three master prints, Knight, Death and the Devil, Saint Jerome in his Study and Melencolia I. His woodcut of a rhinoceros of 1515, made from a written description and a sketch, fixed the image of the animal in Europe for centuries. He painted portraits and altarpieces, worked for the Emperor Maximilian I, and his watercolours, such as the Young Hare in the Albertina in Vienna, are among the first great studies of nature.
Most of what comes to market under his name is prints, and the question is when and how well an impression was printed. His blocks and plates were printed for decades after his lifetime, and the woodcut series such as the Apocalypse were published as books with text on the back, so proof impressions without text, and those from the earliest editions, are worth many times more than late or worn ones; paper and watermarks help to date them. He was copied in his own time, most famously by Marcantonio Raimondi, and engraved copies by other hands, including the Wierix brothers, can be very close to the originals. Paintings and drawings by him are very rare outside museums, and works by his pupils and Nuremberg contemporaries, such as Hans Baldung Grien and Hans von Kulmbach, are attributed with care.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
