?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
ALBRECHT DÜRER St. Christopher, Facing to the Right.
Engraving, 1521. 118x75 mm; 4 5/8x3 inches. A superb, richly-inked Meder a impression, with very strong contrasts and no sign of wear, consistent with the earliest impressions of this subject. Ex-collection Alfred Morrison (Lugt 151, verso). Trimmed on the plate mark. Bartsch 52; Meder 52.
Dürer (1471-1528) traveled from his hometown of Nuremberg to the Netherlandish Low Countries from 1520-21, to appeal to the newly appointed Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, to reconfirm the annuity to be paid to him by the Nuremberg City Council. Weeks before his departure back to Nuremberg, and evidently during a sketching trip to the Netherlandish coast to draw a stranded whale, he contracted malarial fever and returned home very sick. Two of the first engravings he made after returning to Nuremberg in the fall of 1521 were representations of St. Christopher, not coincidentally the patron saint of travelers (see lot 32).
