Pictures Every Child Should Know / A Selection of the World's Art Masterpieces for Young People

by Mary Schell Hoke Bacon

Albrecht Dürer by nationality was a Hungarian, but he was born in the city of Nuremberg. His father had come from the little Hungarian town of Eytas to Nuremberg that he might practise the craft of a goldsmith. Notwithstanding his Hungarian origin, the name is German and the family "bearing," or sign, is the open door. This device suggests that the name was first formed from "Thurer," which means "carpenter," maker of doors.

The father became the goldworker for a master goldsmith of Nuremberg named Hieronymus Holper, and very soon the new employee had fallen in love with his master's daughter. The daughter was very young and very beautiful; her name was Barbara, and as Herr Dürer was quite forty years of age, while she was but fifteen, the match seemed most unlikely, but they married and had eighteen children! The great painter was one of them.

Albrecht loved his parents most tenderly, and from first to last we hear no word of disagreement among any members of that immense household. Young Albrecht was especially the companion of his father, being brilliant, generous, and hard-working in a family where everyone needed to do his best to help along. This love and companionship never ceased until death, and after his parents died Albrecht wrote in a touching manner of their death, describing his love for them, and their many virtues. He was an author and a poet as well as a painter, and only Leonardo da Vinci matched him for greatness and versatility. We may know what Dürer's father looked like, since the son made two portraits of him; one is to be seen in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence and the other belongs to the Duke of Northumberland's collection. The latter portrait has been reproduced in an engraving, so that it is familiar to most people.

In the days when the great artist was growing up, Nuremberg was the centre of all intellectuality and art in the North. The city of Augsburg also followed art fashions, but it was far less important than Nuremberg, because in the latter city every sort of art-craft was followed in sincerity and with great originality.

In those days, the craft of the goldsmith was closely allied with the profession of the painter, because the smith had to create his own designs, and that called for much talent. Thus it was but a step from designing in precious metals to the use of colour, and to engraving. In making wood engravings, however, the drudgery of it was left almost entirely to workmen, not artists. Nuremberg was also the seat of musical learning. Wagner makes this fact pathetic, comical, and altogether charming in his "Mastersingers of Nuremberg."

Till Dürer's time, however, there had been little painting that could be regarded as art, and when he came to study it there was but little opportunity in his own land, but Dürer was destined to bring art to Nuremberg. If he went elsewhere to study, it was only for a little time, because he was above all things patriotic and dearly loved his home.

With seventeen brothers and sisters, young Dürer's problem was a serious one. His father not only meant him to become a goldsmith like himself--a craft in which there was much money to be made at a time when people dressed with great ornamentation and used gold to decorate with--it was highly necessary with so large a family that he should learn to do that which could make him helpful to his father. Hence the young boy entered his father's shop. If he had not been handicapped with so many to help to maintain, he would have laid up a considerable fortune, because from the very beginning he was master of all that he undertook; doing the least thing better than any other did it, putting conscience and painstaking into all.

"My father took special delight in me," the son said, "seeing that I was industrious in working and learning, he put me to school; and when I had learned to read and write, he took me home from my school and taught me the goldsmith's trade."

The family were good and kind; excellent neighbours, deeply religious, and little Albrecht certainly was comely. He was beautiful as a little child, and as a man was very handsome, with long light hair sweeping his shoulders, and gentle eyes. He was very tall, stately, and full of dignity.

In his father's shop he made little clay figures which were afterward moulded in metal; also he learned to carve wood and ivory, and he added the touch of originality to all that he did. He was the Leonardo da Vinci of Germany, an intellectual man, a poet, painter, sculptor, engraver, and engineer. He approached everything that he did from an intellectual point of view, looking for the reasons of things.