What Survives of Natterer's Hand

August Natterer worked in the decades around 1900, institutionalised in Germany and drawing almost entirely from inner visions. His output was never large. The body of work that reached the public eye consists of a few dozen drawings, and a substantial share of those now sit in the Prinzhorn Collection in Heidelberg, where the art of psychiatric patients was assembled in the early twentieth century.

Within that small corpus, the images are apocalyptic and architectural. His famous Weltachse mit Hase, a world axis with a hare, is the sort of thing he drew. Faces appear, but they are visionary figures rather than studied likenesses. Nothing in the standard literature presents a sheet as an unambiguous self-portrait, and with an artist this obscure, silence in the literature usually means the thing does not exist or was never identified.

Why the Record Is So Thin

Natterer was not a professional artist and never sought an audience. He was an engineer by training before his illness, and his drawings were made in clinical circumstances, noticed by psychiatrists rather than by dealers. A handful were reproduced in the art historian and psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn's 1922 book on the image-making of the mentally ill, which is how later artists, including the Surrealists, came to know his name.

That provenance explains the gap the searcher has run into. There was no studio, no estate sale, no steady market producing dated self-portraits across a career. There was a short, intense burst of drawing, then decades of near silence. Where to find Natterer's self-portrait artworks is therefore a question with a short answer, because the category itself barely exists in his known output.

For anyone verifying this independently, the practical route is the Prinzhorn Collection's documentation. It is the closest thing to a definitive record of what Natterer made, and it is the reference any serious reproduction publisher would work from.

Buying Natterer Without a Self-Portrait

If the interest is the artist rather than the genre, the available reproductions are his visionary sheets. Weltachse mit Hase and the cosmological drawings are what circulate, and they are strange enough to anchor a wall on their own terms. Expect a narrow selection from any print seller, and expect the honest ones to say when a title is out of stock rather than substituting something misattributed.

One caution belongs here. Natterer's work sits in a category where misattribution is easy, because his drawings are unsigned in the conventional sense and the literature is thin. A reproduction seller who cannot say which collection the original belongs to is guessing. That matters less for a print than it would for an original, but it is still the difference between a picture and a fact. Auvrique does not currently carry Natterer editions, so anyone buying now is buying elsewhere, and should ask that question there.