Sale 2460 - Old Master Through Modern Prints, November 2, 2017

31  ALBRECHT DÜRER St. Christopher Facing Left . Engraving, 1521. 118x76 mm; 4 1 / 2 x3 inches, narrow margins. A superb, dark, richly-inked Meder a-b impression with strong contrasts and no sign of wear. Dürer 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 a malarial fever and returned home a sick man. 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. Bartsch 51; Meder 53. [3,000/5,000]