LONDON STEREO CO.
PORTRAIT OF A LADY, BY ALBRECHT DÜRER; IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM
⇒
LARGER IMAGE
I have said nothing, so far, about the authorship of the drawing. The name of Holbein had been mentioned, but from the moment in which I first set eyes on it I had scarcely a doubt that the draughtsman was Dürer. No other artist of that date, so far as I remember, drew portraits in chalk on a green ground. No suspicion of forgery or fraud could be seriously entertained, and any momentary hesitation suggested by the formation of the eyes, the weak drawing of the left hand (an undeniable blemish), or the lack of energy in the shading of the costume, was soon dispelled by comparison with other drawings by Dürer on a similar scale and also on green paper, the authenticity of which has never been questioned. The impression suggested by the technique of the drawing itself was confirmed by an examination of the inscription and date, which are written in indian ink, and are indisputably genuine. Every letter is characteristic of Dürer’s handwriting; the inscription may be compared especially with the long note of the same date on a drawing in the Vienna Hofmuseum (Lippmann, 423), in which Dürer has recorded a curious dream that he had in the early summer of 1525. The figures of the date agree closely with those on the Vienna drawing, and still more strikingly with those on a drawing in Mr. Heseltine’s collection (Lippmann, 172), the portrait of a young lady in a hat, with a dog on her lap, not signed, but dated 1525, also in indian ink. Mr. Heseltine’s portrait is that of a much more attractive person; it is also more carefully finished than the drawing which has recently come to light: but the two have much in common, even to the weak drawing of the left hand and the curious break in the outline of the upper eyelid of the left eye. The pose of the two figures is the same; the treatment of the clothes, both in outline and in shading, is curiously similar. The new portrait may also be compared with two large drawings on green paper already in the British museum: the portrait of Dürer’s wife, seriously damaged, of 1522 (Lippmann, 291), and the much more finished and masterly likeness of Henry Parker, Lord Morley (Lippmann, 87), drawn on the occasion of his visit to Nuremberg in 1523[94] as a special envoy sent to confer the order of the Garter on the Archduke Ferdinand. The ground of the latter drawing is of a bluer tint, but the green of Mr. Heseltine’s drawing and of the portrait of Agnes Dürer is almost identical with that of the new drawing in the British museum. ¶ The next question which arose when the authorship of the drawing was established to my own, and, I may add, to Mr. Colvin’s satisfaction, was the interpretation of the line of Dürer’s handwriting, ‘1525 Casmirs schwestr fraw margret.’ No Casimir was known to me among the circle of Dürer’s friends or patrons, but I was not long in finding a solution which seems to meet all the requirements of the case. The name Casimir at once suggested the royal house of Poland; a reference to the first work on Polish history that lay at hand provided me with the name of a connexion of that family whose residence was not far away from Nuremberg. This was Casimir, margrave of Culmbach (1481–1527), eldest son of the Margrave Frederick of Brandenburg-Ansbach and Bayreuth (1460–1536) by his marriage with Sophia, daughter of Casimir III of Poland. Frederick, being of feeble intellect, was deposed in 1515 by his sons and confined in the castle of Plassenburg; Casimir thereupon ruled over the greater part of the Franconian possessions of the house of Hohenzollern. He was a soldier with mediaeval ideas, and a steadfast Catholic, in opposition to his brother George of Bayreuth, who favoured the reformers; he died on September 21, 1527, at Ofen, while holding a high command under Ferdinand in the Hungarian war, and was buried, like most of his family, in the abbey church at Heilsbronn. The name of his eldest sister was Margaret; she was born in January 1483, and died, unmarried, in 1532. I suggest, then, that this prince and princess, both living in 1525, are the Casimir and Margaret of Dürer’s note. The portrait may well be that of a woman of forty-two, though we might guess her to be older. There is nothing unusual in the title ‘Frau Margret’ being applied to a lady of princely rank; we may compare the titles ‘the Lady Mary,’ ‘the Lady Elizabeth,’ by which the princesses of our own royal house of Tudor were known at the same period. I can discover no other portrait of Margaret of Brandenburg-Ansbach, except as one of a group of the daughters of the Margravine Sophia on a wing of an altarpiece at Heilsbronn[95]; here, however, the kneeling princesses are all painted to one pattern, and at so early an age that no comparison of the features is possible. Dürer’s note is thus the only ground for believing that the newly acquired portrait is that of a Hohenzollern princess. ¶ I was not previously aware that Dürer had enjoyed the patronage of any member of that illustrious family, but I ascertained in the course of the present investigation that there is reason to think that he had had direct relations with the Margrave Casimir himself. Dr. Julius Meyer[96] describes a lost votive picture by Dürer, which represented the body of our Saviour being anointed for burial, with Susanna, wife of Casimir, kneeling in adoration, and Casimir himself standing at her right hand. The picture is only known by a full description in a MS. inventory written in 1768 by its then owner, Hofrath Christian Friedrich von Knebel (1728–1805), at Ansbach. It was signed and dated 1518 in gold. It was painted, therefore, in the year of Casimir’s marriage with Susanna (1502–1543), daughter of Duke Albert III of Bavaria by his marriage with Kunigunda of Austria, sister of the Emperor Maximilian I. Susanna is described by Knebel as ‘Dürer’s great protectress’; it is reasonable to suppose, at any rate, that the close relations in which he stood at this time with the emperor, her uncle, may have led to his appointment to paint the portrait of the niece. ¶ I cannot resist the conjecture—it is hardly more—that the portrait in Mr. Heseltine’s collection was done at the same time, and represents another member of the Margrave Casimir’s family, in all probability his wife, Susanna of Bavaria. The lady cannot be another of his sisters, the youngest of whom, Barbara, was at this time thirty, while the only other survivors, Sophia and Anna, were forty and thirty-eight respectively, and already married.[97] Susanna, on the other hand, was twenty-three, and the portrait may well stand for a lady of that age. She appears to have been fond of dogs, for a large dog lay before her in Knebel’s picture. Medals of the years 1522, 1525 and 1527 respectively, containing portraits of this princess, are reproduced in ‘Schaumünzen des Hauses Hohenzollern,’ Berlin, 1901 (Nos. 522–524). No. 524, in which she is represented in a wide hat, in three-quarter face to the right, agrees best with Dürer’s drawing, but the features are far less pleasing, and Dürer was not wont to flatter his sitters. In 1528, a year after Casimir’s death, his widow married Otto Heinrich, of Neuburg, count (afterwards elector) palatine. Two medals of the year 1529, by Peter Flötner and Hans Daucher, representing Susanna in profile, are preserved in the Munich and Vienna cabinets respectively.[98] Both are superior as works of art to the earlier portraits reproduced among the Hohenzollern medals, and they tend, I think, to confirm, if not to prove, my hypothesis. ¶ Mr. Heseltine’s drawing formerly had an inscription which doubtless gave the name of the person represented. Unfortunately some vandal has cut the paper down, and his scissors have only left the extreme ends of two letters, which may be seen above the date, 1525, written, exactly as on the British museum drawing, with indian ink. Dr. Lippmann, in his note on No. 172, suggests that the lady was an Englishwoman and the drawing a counterpart to the portrait of Morley. This entirely gratuitous assumption compels him to suppose that the date was added by a later hand, and that the drawing was really made a few years earlier than 1525. The authentic inscription and date on the portrait of ‘Fraw Margret’ dispose, I think, of that suggestion. ¶ The new portrait, though not one of the finest class of Dürer drawings, is a welcome addition to the London collection, which is already unusually rich in large portrait-heads of the master’s later years.
LONDON STEREO CO.
PORTRAIT OF A LADY, BY ALBRECHT DÜRER; IN THE COLLECTION OF MR. J. P. HESELTINE
⇒
LARGER IMAGE