Everyone’s heard the idiom: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” But for Matt Winter, a 24-year-old from the small English town of Cranbrook, an unassuming etching destined for the waste bin just landed him $44,000 USD at auction. The artwork, Knight, Death and the Devil (1513–14), was recently deemed by experts as a museum-worthy original by the acclaimed German Renaissance painter Albrecht Dürer.
Winter had originally obtained the engraving when he was 11 from a woman who was going to throw it in the trash. The exceptional level of detail caught his eye and after 13 years of holding on to it, he sought professional help for an appraisal. “It’s got so much detail to it, and something told me that’s worth something but I never really knew what,” Winter said in a past interview.
On Wednesday, September 18, Staffordshire’s Rare Book Auctions sold Knight, Death and the Devil (1513–14) for £33,390 GBP ($44,000 USD) to a private German collector, far exceeding its initial estimate of $13,300 to $26,600 USD. A master writer, painter and printmaker, Dürer is accredited for bringing Renaissance art to Germany and Northern Europe five centuries ago. His work is housed in various institutions around the world, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alte Pinakothek in Munich and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
