?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
HANS BROSAMER Nude Couple with a Child.
Woodcut, circa 1540. 285x183 mm; 11 1/4x7 1/4 inches (sheet). A very good, evenly-printed impression of this extremely scarce, early woodcut.
We have found only one other impression at auction in the past 30 years.
Little more is known of Brosamer (late 1490s-circa 1554) aside from he was active in Fulda from 1536 to 1545, and later worked in Erfurt, now part of central Germany, as a draughtsman, printmaker and painter of the northern Renaissance period. Many of his engravings, both religious and secular in subject, of which Hollstein lists 38 different subjects, are small in size and thereby place Brosamer among the German "Little Master" printmakers. Contrary to this and aside from the numerous woodcut book illustrations, his single-sheet woodcuts, like the current work, are considerably larger and many were undoubtedly meant to be pasted onto walls as decoration. One of his woodcuts, David and Bathsheba, 1554, his last dated work, was printed on nine sheets of paper joined together. He also made scathing, hostile images of Martin Luther, including the Caricature of Luther with Seven Heads, woodcut, 1529.
Provenance: Friedrich August II, Dresden (Lugt 971, lower right recto). Hollstein 443.
