500 years old: Family discovers treasure worth millions in wooden box

Paris – This supposed clearing-out operation was really worth it: When a family from France looked into a wooden box that hadn’t been opened for 500 years, it turned out to be a real treasure chest. Inside was a work of art that is said to be worth up to three million euros! Even experts are now amazed at this seemingly inconspicuous drawing at first glance: the work comes from a contemporary of the medieval megastar Albrecht Dürer (1471 – 1528).

The German one artist Hans Baldung Grien (1484/85 – 1545) from Schwäbisch Gmünd made the portrait of a woman. The artist drew the portrait of Susanna Pfeffinger from Strasbourg in 1517 and later became famous himself. But the work was still forgotten. Now it is appearing in public for the first time.

Descendants found treasure while taking inventory

The descendants of the owners from Alsace in France apparently took inventory and came across the valuable drawing in a wooden box. The Paris gallery owner Patrick de Bayser from the Cabinet de Bayser gallery described the find as a “shock” and added at the presentation in Paris: “Drawings by Hans Baldung are extremely rare.” Very little of it exists in private collections, it said. The idiosyncratic Baldung made a career during his lifetime in the Renaissance with open-hearted images of saints or scenes of the Fall of Man. As a painter, draftsman and engraver, he also worked for a few years in the studio of Albrecht Dürer in Nuremberg. The Gemäldegalerie in Berlin and the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland own several of his works. Baldung died in Strasbourg.

Now the image of Susanna Pfeffinger could make the current owners quite rich. On March 23rd the drawing should be at a Auction of the house Beaussant Lefèvre & Associés in Paris. The estimated price: 1.5 to 3 million euros. Auctioneer Arthur de Moras says that the family has numerous pictures in their extensive family archive. Dozens of more distant ancestors had been kept in a wooden box – including the picture that now turned out to be the work of Hans Baldung Grien.