Emily Chan
Thirteen years ago, an 11-year-old boy in England discovered an elaborate-looking piece of artwork at a dump site and decided to take it home with him.
For over a decade, he stored it in his home. Little did he know that he had a rare 500-year-old Renaissance print in his possession. Recently, it was put up for auction and sold for about $40,000.
At the age of 11, Mat Winter was exploring a dump when an ornately detailed engraving in a mound of trash caught his eye.
The garbage was in the back of a woman’s car. When he asked the woman if he could have it, she said yes.
Since he was a kid, Winter had been intrigued by antiques and would regularly search for treasure in the local dump.
Winter is now 24-years-old. This year, he took the engraving to an auction house in Staffordshire, England, called Rare Book Auctions to get it appraised.
“When the vendor said it had been rescued from a dump, I didn’t expect much,” said Jim Spencer, director of the auction house.
“I felt a shiver of excitement as soon as I looked upon this print…and I was straight on a train to the British Museum.”
Winter’s childhood hobby paid off. Spencer knew immediately that the engraving was the work of Albrecht Dürer, a famous German Renaissance artist. Dürer was born in 1471 and was a contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci.
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
