Head of a Bearded Old Man

The drawing depicting an old man’s head en face, crated on laid paper. The general outline of the figure and the shadows are drawn in black crayon, while the light flecks were emphasised with white gouache.
Albrecht Dürer’s drawings used to be the most valuable element of the Ossolineum collection. Unfortunately, the Museum lost them irretrievably as a result of the war robbery. The “Head of a Bearded Man” survived quite accidentally. In 1929 Wolf Hubert was recognised as the author of the drawing. Experts agreed with this attribution and the work signed with this name was presented at numerous exhibitions, both in Europe and America. Thieves plundering the Ossolineum collection during World War II did not take any interest in the work of the little-known artist, which many years later turned out to be a drawing by the eminent Albrecht Dürer. The previous attribution was put in doubt as a very poorly legible yet characteristic AD monogram, which the artist used to sign his works, was noticed on the edge of the sheet.
Many years later the work returned to the Lubomirski Princes’ Museum collection and now is one of its most valuable items, the only Dürer’s drawing from among those held in the Ossolineum collection before the war.