Eleven days later, the owner sent pictures of the artwork to Mr. Schurer, who said he went straight to the man’s house, where the man and his wife live modestly, he said. Mr. Schurer sat at the kitchen table looking at the piece.
“It was either a masterpiece or the greatest forgery I’ve ever seen,” he said.
He said Mr. Schurer, who specializes in recovering lost art, paid the man $100,000 up front to sell the painting. (He said the exact terms are confidential, but both would get the money on sale.) Mr. Schurer would lose his predecessor if the work turned out to be a forgery.
Mr. Phillipson said his friend, the owner of the drawing, declined to comment.
Three days later, Mr. Schurer boarded a plane bound for England to speed up the checkout in the hands of Jane Mac Osland, a bookkeeper who advises museums, dealers and auction houses. She did not respond to emails from The Times this week.
Three weeks after his visit, Mr. Schurer said, Mrs. Macausland told him that the drawing was smeared with tea or coffee to make it look like a masterpiece. But he asked her to look again, and he emailed her back the next day with a photo. He clicked on it, and the image showed a translucent light shining through the paper.
“It had a trident watermark on it,” he said, “which is only present in Albrecht Dürer’s drawings.” “I stunned my mind.”
Dürer’s favorite medium was a special paper made by his patron, Jacob Fugger, one of the richest men who ever lived. Only the Dürer Workshop had access to that paper, which was Fugger’s watermarked, according to Christoph Metzger, a Dürer specialist who was a member of the panel of experts that approved the drawing this month.