Albrecht Altdorfer, A Thickly Wooded Landscape With a Rainbow Behind the Trees and a Distant Outcrop to the Right Beneath a Cloud-Laden Sky, 1520.Courtesy Sotheby's

A Rare Albrecht Altdorfer Painting Heads to Sotheby’s for $6.67 M.

by · ARTnews

A rare painting by Renaissance German artist Albrecht Altdorfer will appear at Sotheby’s on December 9 in the London “Old Master & 19th Century Paintings” evening auction.

The painting, which was completed around 1520, is estimated to be worth $3 million to $6.7 million (£3 million to £5 million). Carrying the lengthy title, A Thickly Wooded Landscape With a Rainbow Behind the Trees and a Distant Outcrop to the Right Beneath a Cloud-Laden Sky, the work will make its first public appearance after 70 years squirreled away in a private Swiss collection.

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George Gordon, chairman of Sotheby’s worldwide old masters department, said in a statement that every inch of the painting is “imbued with an intense mood that transcends its scale,” referring to the artwork’s small measurements of 23 cm by 20 cm. The painting depicts trees and greenery against a gray and blue backdrop, with what seems to be a distant volcano in the background. Gordon said that the atmosphere is “palpable, you can feel that the rain has just stopped, and the sun behind the clouds is struggling to make its presence felt, its light refracted though the rainbow that arcs behind the trees.”

Albrecht Altdorfer, A Thickly Wooded Landscape With a Rainbow Behind the Trees and a Distant Outcrop to the Right Beneath a Cloud-Laden Sky, 1520.Courtesy Sotheby’s

Altdorfer is considered one of the earliest Western landscape artists. Before the painting was identified earlier this year, only two paintings by the artist were known to the public: Landscape With a Footbridge, held by the National Gallery in London, and Landscape of the Danube near Regensburg at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. “Dating from some 500 years ago, it somehow still feels as modern and immediate as it would have appeared to those seeing it when it was first painted,” said Gordon, reinforcing the painting’s rarity, which was acquired by the owner’s father in 1957 from the collection of the counts of Harrach at the Palais Harrach in Vienna.

The last time an Altdorfer painting headed to auction was in 1980, when Christ Taking Leave of His Mother (1520) was acquired privately by the National Gallery for $3.30 million (£2.45 million) through Christie’s.

A Thickly Wooded Landscape With a Rainbow Behind the Trees and a Distant Outcrop to the Right Beneath a Cloud-Laden Sky will be exhibited to the public at Sotheby’s New York from November 7 to 19 followed by London from December 4 to 9.