About
The book, this copy, and the search for the drawings
The book
Felix Becker, Handzeichnungen alter Meister in Privatsammlungen. Leipzig, 1922.
A portfolio of fifty Old Master drawings, reproduced on 48 loose sheets, with a text booklet: Becker’s foreword and a commentary on each plate, giving the medium, size, inscriptions and the private collection that owned the drawing at the time. Becker presented all fifty as previously unpublished.
The edition
The imprint states that the work appeared in an edition of 500 copies. The drawings came from private collections of the time in Leipzig, Dessau, Munich and elsewhere; two belonged to Becker himself.
This copy
This copy is in a green cloth portfolio. It contains 47 of the 48 sheets: plate 4 (Wolf Huber, Bewaldete Felsen mit Burgbauten) is missing. Plates 6 and 7, and plates 17 and 18, are printed together on shared sheets, so the copy holds 49 of the 50 drawings.
Every surviving sheet was photographed in 2026: the full sheet, a close-up of the reproduction, and the printed caption.
How the research was done
Each plate was checked against Becker’s 1922 text and then against modern museum collection records, scholarly literature and auction records.
A drawing is reported as found only where an institution’s own record identifies it, or where the match is specific: the same composition, inscription, dimensions or provenance.
Becker’s 1922 descriptions are kept separate from modern cataloguing. Each plate page has two blocks: “Becker, 1922” for what he published, and “Today” for current attribution and whereabouts.
Where nothing secure was found, the plate is marked “Not yet located.” That is a statement about the research so far, not about the drawing.
Findings so far
In museums (5)
Plate 7, Harvard Art Museums; plates 8 and 13, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; plates 29 and 36, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.
Traced through sales (1)
Plate 44, Passarotti: sold at Christie’s New York, 27 January 2022, lot 93, for $75,000. The buyer is not identified.
Lost in World War II (1)
Plate 3, Cranach: one of the Koenigs drawings sold in 1940 to Hans Posse for Hitler’s planned museum at Linz; missing since the war.
Not yet located (43)
The remaining drawings, including plate 4, which is missing from this copy.
The thread on X
The research was first shared as a 50-post thread, one post per plate.
Read the thread: x.com/TheDouble6/status/2110169054485123078