The Fall of Man (Adam and Eve)

Dürer engraved this plate in 1504 and signed it in full, in Latin, on a small tablet hanging from a branch at the upper left: Albert Dürer of Nuremberg made this. Every sheet printed from the plate carries that tablet, so the story of one particular impression has to be read on its back, from the collectors' stamps. The first owner this one records is Friedrich August II, King of Saxony in the mid-19th century and a serious collector of prints, whose cabinet was in Dresden. Much later it belonged to Tomás Harris, a London dealer in Spanish art who during the Second World War had worked for British intelligence as the case officer of Garbo, the double agent who helped mislead the Germans about D-Day. Harris died in a car crash on Majorca in 1964. In 1968 the London firm of Colnaghi sold the sheet to Boston, paid for with a gift marking the museum's approaching centenary. The paper carries a bull's head watermark, and Dürer specialists class this sheet among the early printings of the finished plate.