He had a great struggle for a living. And here an amusing analogy occurs to me. Painting does not pay, he complains at one time, and therefore he devotes himself to "black and white."
Was it ever thus? Would that some of our own struggling artists remembered Dürer, and even when they find themselves compelled to do something to keep the pot aboiling, at any rate do their best.
PLATE III.—PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST
(From the Oil-painting in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich)
This picture bears the date 1500 and a Latin inscription, "I, Albert Dürer, of Nuremberg, painted my own portrait here in the proper colours, at the age of twenty-eight."
According to Thausing, this picture had a curious fate. The panel on which it was painted was sawn in two by an engraver to whom it was lent, and who affixed the back to his own poor copy of the picture—thus using the seal of the Nuremberg magistrates, which was placed upon it, to authenticate his copy as a genuine work of the master.
We have it on Dürer's own authority that he took up etching and wood-engraving because it paid better. And strange—into this bread-and-butter work he put his best.
It is not his painting that made his fame and name, though in that branch of Art he was admired by a Raphael and a Bellini.