An extremely rare engraving by the Northern Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), which was discovered in a landfill, has fetched £33,390 at auction.

The 500-year-old print belongs to a group of three Meisterstitche (master engravings) by Dürer. Titled Knight, Death and the Devil, it depicts a steadfast knight riding his horse alongside a harrowed representation of death and a leering goat-like devil. The copper engraving, which is signed and dated to 1513, is one of Dürer’s most spectacular and complex prints.

At the tender age of eleven, Mat Winter claims he rescued the lost Dürer one fateful afternoon whilst rummaging around at the local dump in Cranbrook, Kent. He clocked eyes on the work in the back of a woman’s car and asked her if he could take it home.

“It’s got so much detail to it, and something told me that’s worth something but I never really knew what,” recalled Winter. For more than a decade, Winter remained unaware of its true value until he consulted Rare Book Auctions on a whim.

Jim Spencer, the director of the auction house in Lichfield, “felt a shiver of excitement” when he first saw the print. “My hands were shaking as I held it up to the light. The laid paper was absolutely right for the period. The quality of the engraving was exceptional beyond words. I knew that only one person could’ve produced something like this—it had to be the hand of Dürer himself.”

Spencer believed it was a valuable, early edition of the print and hurriedly contacted the British Museum. Experts identified a faint scratch across the head of the knight’s horse that disappears from the copper plate in later prints, confirming Spencer’s suspicion that it was indeed a first state masterpiece.

It was listed with a guide price between £10,000 and £20,000 at the online auction. Spencer said there had been interest in the engraving “from all over the world“. The successful bidder, who hailed from Germany, paid three times the low estimate at £33,390 including fees. “I guess you could say this German Renaissance print is going home,” added Spencer.

Whilst Winter’s print is undoubtedly rare, it did not achieve as much as it might have, had it not been pasted onto a mount at the turn of the twentieth century. Unmounted examples have sold for up to £200,000.

“Dürer’s earlier, more Gothic woodcuts were revolutionary,” explained Spencer. “But his copper engravings were even more amazing, awe-inspiring, almost superhuman – as this engraving shows.”