France Blocks Drouot Sale of Newly Identified Hans Baldung Grien Silverpoint Portrait
A drawing the size of a postcard has become the center of a high-stakes cultural standoff in Paris. Days before it was due to cross the auction block at Drouot, France’s culture ministry stepped in to stop the sale of a work recently identified as by German Renaissance artist Hans Baldung Grien (c. 1484–1545), one of Albrecht Dürer’s most accomplished protégés.
The bust-length portrait of a woman, measuring 15.7 cm by 10.4 cm, had been scheduled for auction by Beaussant Lefevre on March 23 with a pre-sale estimate of EUR 1.5 million to EUR 3 million. Instead, a decree published on March 21 declared the drawing a “national treasure,” preventing it from leaving France for 30 months.
Under French heritage rules, the export block is designed to give potential French buyers, including public institutions, time to assemble the funds needed to acquire the work and keep it in the country. An export license application had been filed in November 2025 and was rejected this week, activating the 30-month window.
The drawing’s rarity is central to the ministry’s decision. Baldung’s surviving drawings are scarce, with roughly 250 known. Silverpoint portraits are rarer still: the ministry cited the opinion of its Advisory Committee on National Treasures, noting that only 12 silverpoint portraits by Baldung are currently known and that none are held in French public collections. In its ruling, the ministry described the sheet as a work of “major historical and artistic interest” for the national heritage and framed its reappearance as one of the last chances for such an object to enter a French public collection.
The portrait itself is a technical showpiece. Drawn in silverpoint on bone powder-primed paper, it bears Baldung’s monogram and the date 1517. The sitter is shown in a bonnet with a chinstrap and a high-necked robe, and an inscription identifies her as Susanna Pfeffinger, the wife of a wealthy Strasbourg burgher. Baldung lived and worked in Strasbourg for much of his life, and the work’s uninterrupted local provenance has become part of its cultural argument.
According to Beaussant Lefevre auctioneer Arthur de Moras, the sheet is the only silverpoint portrait by Baldung still in private hands. The last Baldung drawing to appear at auction was sold in 2007 at Christie’s in New York for more than $3.7 million.
The drawing was discovered last year when de Moras was preparing a probate inventory for the family that has owned it for around 500 years: descendants of the Pfeffinger line. Although the portrait appeared in a photograph published in a 1981 history of Strasbourg, its authorship was not understood at the time. Patrick de Bayser, a leading French specialist in Old Master drawings, attributed the work to Baldung and described it as the most significant piece brought to him for authentication in the past decade. He said the family had believed it might be by Hans Holbein, but he rejected that possibility and connected the sheet to Baldung, citing renewed attention to the artist following the 2019 monographic exhibition “Hans Baldung Grien: Sacred and Profane” at the Karlsruhe State Art Gallery.
The attribution has been supported by additional experts, including Christof Metzger, chief curator of graphic arts at the Albertina in Vienna, and Dorit Schäfer, head of prints and drawings at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe. Metzger has suggested the drawing may have come from the same sketchbook as a well-known series held by the Karlsruhe museum, calling the find “more-or-less a once in a lifetime discovery.”
Beaussant Lefevre has now suspended the sale. In a statement, the auction house said the classification as a national treasure, issued only 48 hours before the planned public auction, undermined the ability to conduct the sale under normal conditions, despite strong interest from international institutions and collectors. The vendors, de Moras added, will seek to negotiate a private sale to a French buyer.
For France, the decision underscores a familiar tension between the international market for Old Master works on paper and the state’s determination to secure exceptional objects for public collections. For collectors and museums watching from abroad, it is a reminder that, in Paris, the most consequential bid may be the one made off the auction floor — and within the boundaries of the nation.
