THIS OLD THING? WORTH $50M!
Lucky Renaissance find
Had Clifford Schorer not been running late for a friend’s retirement party, he would never have stumbled across a 500-year-old masterpiece drawing that has the art world aflutter.
It’s now anticipated that the work — “The Virgin and Child with a Flower on a Grassy Bank,” by Renaissance star Albrecht Dürer — could make Schorer, an entrepreneur from Boston, a very wealthy man.
“We believe it will be worth a record price,” Schorer, 55, told The Post. “The speculation is that this will be at least $50 million.”
His wild ride began in 2019, when he was driving his 2012 Prius on Interstate 495, en route to New Haven, Conn., where Amy Meyers, director of the Yale Center for British Art, was having a retirement party.
“I forgot my gift,” said Schorer. “It was 5:05 p.m., and I didn’t think I would find anything open.”
So he turned to Google and came across Brainerd Phillipson, a rare book dealer who sold titles out of his home. Schorer pulled off the highway, scored a William Blake poetry book and was hustling back to his car when Philbrook asked if he knew anything about art.
In fact, Schorer, who buys and sells distressed companies, also collects art and was once president of the Worcester Art Museum.
“Then Brainerd told me that his friend has an Albrecht Dürer drawing,” he recalled. “I said, ‘No. He doesn’t have a drawing. He has an engraving. There are zero drawings by Dürer that are both unknown and privately owned.’ ”
Little of Dürer’s work ever hits the open market. Only a handful of his drawings have been put up for sale since 1978, when a watercolor went for around $1.3 million at Sotheby’s in London.
Schorer said it would be fine for Brainerd to give his number to the friend. “Eleven days later,” he said, “I got a text with an image that looked like a typical print of Madonna and child, but it was so pixilated that I couldn’t see much. Then I got a higher-resolution image and was dumbfounded.”
He had to see it in person. The man with the drawing, who remains anonymous, happened to live one mile away. He asked Schorer what he thought.
“I said, ‘This is either a masterpiece or the greatest fraud in the world.’ ”
The man, who earned a modest living buying and selling secondhand goods, had picked up the drawing at a Concord, Mass., estate sale for $30 — he is, Schorer explained, “religious and I think he respected the religious allegory.”
That sale took place in 2016, following the passing of architect Jean Paul Carlihan. According to the Boston Herald, Carlihan inherited the piece from his grandfather, who bought it in Paris in 1919. The husband of a family member told The Post that he “did not remember seeing it hanging” in Carlihan’s home. This makes sense, as his survivors believed it to be a nearly worthless reproduction.
Like Carlihan’s heirs, the buyer also had no idea what the drawing was worth. In fact, he previously almost sold it to a person who wanted the piece strictly for its frame. Whether the piece is real or not is still up for debate. Over the past couple of years, the work has been on a worldwide tour, showing at the Albertina Museum in Vienna and the Agnews Gallery in London, where it is currently being exhibited. Next month the piece arrives in Manhattan, where it will be displayed at Colnaghi gallery beginning Jan. 21.
At some point, Schorer plans to sell the Dürer. Though he is not sure when that may happen — “The art world is slow-moving,” Schorer said. “If you hope to sell it in a certain year, you will be out of luck” — he anticipates it landing at a museum or with a wellheeled collector. “This is the find of my life,” he said. “Wherever it ends up, I would want to visit it.”