The man bought the drawing for 30 dollars, then found the real source
Everyone who scours real estate sales, frequents thrift stores, and buys second-hand storage unit stuff hopes to get there: Beat the system, find a treasure worth much more than its price.
And there are enough stories like this that people keep hoping, searching and buying.
Clifford Schorer, former president of the Worcester Museum of Art and art collector, made a roundabout discovery of life in 2019. He was aiming for a retirement party for the director of the Yale British Art Center, Amy Meyers, when he stopped along the way to buy a delightful gift from Brainerd Phillipson, a local who sold rare goods out of his home.
He found a book of poems by William Blake, but before he left, Phillipson asked him a question that would change the trajectory of his life. Phillipson wanted to know if Schorer knew anything about art.
“Then Brainerd told me that his friend had a drawing of Albrecht Dürer,” he told me. New York Post. “I say no. He has no drawings. He has an engraving. None of Dürer’s drawings are both unknown and privately owned. ‘”
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As a renaissance artist, Dürer’s paintings and drawings are rare. In 1978, one of his watercolors was sold at Sotheby’s for $1.3 million.
With Schorer’s permission, Phillipson passed on his contact information to the friend.
“Eleven days later,” he told the Post, “I received a text that looked like a typical Madonna and child print, but it was so blurred I couldn’t see much. Then I got a higher resolution image and was dumbfounded”.
When he visited the man and saw the piece of fabric with his own eyes, he was shocked and certain that the piece was either a superb fake or the real thing.
The piece’s unnamed owner had received it three years earlier at a sell real estate in Massachusetts for $30. He’s made a career out of reselling, although Schorer is clear from that man’s home and car that he hasn’t made a big deal and could use some cash. .
It previously belonged to an architect in the area, who inherited it from his grandfather who bought it in Paris in 1919. According to the Post, they also thought it was a copy.
However, when the most recent owner discovered it at that estate sale, he saw the initials of Albrecht Dürer and while he thought it might be a copy, he also found it to be “a wonderfully rendered piece of old art, it made sense to buy it”. follow Boston Herald.
Schorer appears to be of the same opinion, and while the details of the exchange have not been made public, he has offered the owner a $100,000 advance for it and taken it to London to be analyzed by the floating paper expert. Jane McAusland, who worked on the work of William Turner and Leonardo da Vinci.
“My own beliefs are my own stupidity,” he told the Post. “If it wasn’t a Dürer drawing, it would be worth several thousand dollars. But three days later, I took a flight to London. The [coach] The seat next to me was empty and I put the drawing there. “
The first news is bad news. McAusland told him that, based on the “false fox mark” (added to enhance the aged appearance of a piece of paper) and the presence of modern adhesives on the back of the paper, the piece of paper looked is a fake.
Unconvinced, Shorer asked the expert to clean the adhesive and see if a beam of light passing through the cleaned paper displayed a specific watermark to identify the product as genuine.
“There is a watermark known only in the drawings of Albrecht Dürer – a trident with a ring next to it,” explains Schorer. “It is the symbol of Jakob Fugger, the richest man who ever lived. He controlled a large part of the European economy, plus copper and linen production, and was a financial supporter of the Pope. He made paper for Albrecht, who was his court artist. “
She found it. The drawing is actually a work of Dürer.
Since then, the 500-year-old painting – “The Virgin and the Child with the Flower on the Grass” – has been made at various galleries, and while there are no immediate plans to sell it, if given the chance, $30 would be an investment of a lifetime.
“We believe it will have a record price,” Schorer said. “Speculation is that the number will be at least $50 million.”
https://www.westernjournal.com/discovery-lifetime-man-buys-drawing-30-figures-true-origin/ The man bought the drawing for 30 dollars, then found the real source
