The Dürer Society (3.1900)

PAINTINGS.

i.

DURER. Portrait of Himself at the age of twenty-two. 1493

Photogravure by M. M. Braun, Clement et Cie, from the painting lately in the Felix ColleElion at


Photographed for the Tdurer Society by permission of the owner,

This is the earliest painting of Durer by himself. The pose of the head is about the same
as in the boyish drawing of 1484, and the same features are easily recognisable. This
portrait was painted during the Wanderjahre, in 1493 ; and perhaps, according to Dr.
Daniel Burckhardt, at Basel. The painting is in oils, and was originally on vellum; it
has been transferred to canvas and was restored at Vienna between fifty and sixty years ago. It was
then in the collection of Dr. Habel at Baden in Lower Austria. Its earlier history is unknown. It
has attracted much attention since it entered the Felix Collection in 1882. The fullest account of
the picture is given in an article by Dr. Hermann Lucke (Zeitschr. f. Bild. Kunst, 1885. xx. 197,
with an engraving by Louis Schulz). It is also described in Thausing’s Life of Durer, vol. I. chap. 6,
and many small reproductions of it have appeared in books and periodicals. Everyone quotes the
description of the picture written by Goethe in his “Annalen” for 1805 (Goethe’s Sammtliche
Werke, 6 Bde, Stuttgart, i860. IV. 647). The poet’s enthusiasm must be a little discounted by the
fact that the portrait which he saw in the Beireis Colledion at Helmstadt was not, as he supposed, an
original painting by Durer, but an old copy on wood, with a Durer monogram added. This copy
was presented to the Municipal Museum at Leipzig in 1882. The whole of Goethe’s description,
except the last few clauses, applies equally well to the original. I translate it as follows:
“A priceless treasure, I thought, was Albrecht Durer’s portrait, painted by himself and dated
1493 (his twenty-second year); a bust, half the size of life, showing both hands, but not the whole
of the elbows; a crimson cap with a short tuft of little strings; the throat bare to below the collar-
bone ; an embroidered hem to the top of the shirt, the folds of the sleeves tied with peach-coloured
ribands, a blue-grey mantle with a border of yellow braid—such a gay suit as a well-bred youth,
fond of dress, would wear; he holds in his hand, significantly, the blue flower eryngium—in
German c Mannstreue ’; a serious, youthful face, with the beard beginning to grow round mouth and
chin; the whole splendidly drawn, rich yet unaffected and harmonious in all its parts, very highly
finished and wholly worthy of Durer, although painted very thinly, so that the colour has shrunk and
cracked in places.”
To this must be added that the original picture bears no signature, but the date 1493 and a
rhyming motto:
“My (min?) sach die gat
“Ais es oben schtat.”
Thausing takes Goethe’s hint, and says that the symbolical flower,*with the motto, suggests
that Diirer’s thoughts were already bent on matrimony. He may have painted this portrait, while far
from home, to further his suit. He returned to Nuremberg in May, 1494, and was married within
two months to Agnes Frey.
The eyes, it is said, have suffered most by restoration, both in colour and drawing, while, on
the whole, Durer’s handiwork has been carefully respected. The colour is now subdued and has
acquired a yellowish tone. It is, perhaps, not quite clear in the reproduction that the object in
Durer’s left hand is only the stalk, bent upwards, of the eryngium which he holds in his right hand.
The original picture, according to a statement published in the Kunstchronik, July 20th, 1900,
was recently sold through the agency of a Dresden firm of pidure dealers to an English collector.

* Sea-holly, called “Mannstreue.” I find no such name for the plant in our English herbals. In Otto Brunfels’ “ Krauterbuch ”
(Strassburg, 1531) I read that men wore the plant to make themselves acceptable to women. “Die Poeten fabulieren,” he continues,
“dass der Phaon von Lesbo hab solich bey ym gehebt darumb er geliebet sey von der Sapho.”

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