Sotheby's to Sell Long-Unseen Altdorfer Landscape in London

A small landscape by the German Renaissance painter Albrecht Altdorfer will be offered at Sotheby's, the London auction house, on 9 December. It is set for the Old Masters Evening Sale, a sale of paintings by artists active before about 1800. The painting carries an estimate of £3 million to £5 million, the range the auction house expects it to sell for.

The work dates from around 1520. It shows a thickly wooded landscape with a rainbow under a densely clouded sky. It was painted on parchment, prepared animal skin, which was later glued to a wooden panel for support. The painting is signed, and it is the smallest of Altdorfer's known landscapes.

It surfaced in a Swiss private collection. The current owner inherited it from his father, who bought it in 1957 from the House of Harrach collection, the holdings of an Austrian noble family. Scholars who study Altdorfer had not known of it. It does not appear in his catalogue raisonné, the complete list of works specialists have accepted as his.

Only three oil landscapes by Altdorfer are known. The other two are held by the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and the National Gallery in London. No Altdorfer work has been offered on the market since 1980, when the National Gallery paid a reported £2.4 million for his Christ Taking Leave of His Mother, according to The Art Newspaper.

Sotheby's will show the painting in New York from 7 to 19 November and in London from 4 to 9 December. For anyone who wants to see it before bidding starts, New York is the earlier window, and London is the one that ends on the day of the sale.

The sale is the point where the price is settled. Bidders compete until the auctioneer closes on a final figure, and the buyer then pays that figure plus the auction house's fees. Until then, the £3 million to £5 million estimate is the only number on the table.