After Albrecht Dürer, 'The Painter's Father', 1497

The earliest reference to a portrait of Dürer’s father likely to be identifiable with NG 1938 occurs in 1627 when portraits of Dürer and his father were mentioned as works by the artist owned by Nuremberg city council: ‘Sonsten hatt man gleichwohl sein Dürers, vnd seines selbst Vatters Conterfett noch in handen’. The portraits are presumably the same as those that Hans Wilhelm Kress von Kressenstein of Nuremberg (1589–1658) refers to in his list, begun in 1625, of Dürer’s works in the city: ‘zweyen Tafelen, in formb eines Altärleins, vf welchen seines Vattern vnd sein Albrecht Durers Prust Bild gestanden, so er Aᵒ 1503 gemahlet vnd hernacher ingleichen von einem E. Rhat verschenkt worden’.

A pair of portraits ‘by Albrecht Dürer of himself and his father’ was presented in November 1636 to Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (1585–1646) as a gift from the city of Nuremberg to King Charles I. The king had received the pictures by 18 March 1637. The inventory of Charles I taken by Abraham van der Doort (about 1575/80–1640) in about 1639 records portraits of Dürer and of his father, the latter ‘Alberdure his father in an old Hungarian fashion black cap in a dark yellow gown wherein his hands are hidden in the wide sleeves painted upon a reddish ground all crackt’. This description of the background of the portrait accords closely with that of NG 1938 and with no other extant version. That the Dürer self portrait owned by Charles I is identical with the self portrait of Dürer dated 1498 now in the Prado can be shown by the presence of a label on the reverse (at the top of the panel): the text reads: ‘to the Kinge / of Nere … e brought by / the Erle ... Arundell Ear ... / Marshall KG, Ambasso ... / Extraordinary to the Emp ... / 1636’. NG 1938 is, like the Prado picture, painted black on the reverse, and fragments of paper labels remain at the bottom: a label inscribed in ink, possibly in a seventeenthcentury hand, on which only the word ‘[p]ictur’ can be read lies beneath another label in English in a later, possibly eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century hand (but see further below), describing the sitter; it appears to give a potted biography of Dürer’s father (‘Elder was / his prof / ession / married in Nuron[?] / daughter’). Conceivably the label underneath it matches that on the reverse of the Prado picture (there applied to the top, not the bottom of the panel): what little can be seen of the handwriting shows some similarity to the label on the reverse of the Prado painting.

The two portraits in the royal collection inventoried in around 1639 must be those recorded in the list of paintings sold from Charles I’s collection after it was declared forfeit by Act of Parliament in July 1649: ‘Albert Dures father & himselfe, pr himselfe’ sold to David Murray on 23 October 1651 for £100. Luis de Haro Marqués del Carpio, minister to Philip IV of Spain and nephew of Spanish first minister Count-Duke of Olivares (died 1645), was financing the purchases of works of art from the collection of Charles I by Philip IV’s ambassador Don Alonso de Cárdenas, with the aim of acquiring the best of these works for Philip IV himself. In a list describing the dealings between the crown’s creditors and Don Alonso de Cárdenas, which includes records of many paintings acquired by him between November 1649 and December 1653, is the entry for 1650, ‘Auer dura [sic] y su Padre en cien libras 500’; the reference to the year 1650 is unreliable, and does not tally with the sale record mentioned above. In September 1651 the Spanish ambassador had reported in a letter to Haro: ‘The two portraits of Albrecht and his father, I am told, have been sold among many other things bought by a dealer acting as agent for a purchaser in Germany’ (evidently a false rumour). The paintings acquired by Cárdenas were sent to Spain in at least four shipments between December 1650 and December 1653. In 1652 or 1653, when much of the collection had been dispersed, two portraits were seen ‘at Mr Knightleyes’ by Richard Symonds; whether these were the originals or copies is uncertain. The two portraits purchased by Cárdenas are recorded in a receipt dated 25 May 1654: ‘Iten, da por descargo reales 300, que costaron los dos retratos de Alberto Duro y de su padre, / de mano del dicho Alberto, ambos de un tamano, de mas de media uara de alto y poco / menos de media de ancho. Tasados ambos en 400 reales y comprado por los dichos. reales 300’. They are listed with two Madonnas by Raphael known to have been in the last shipment arriving in 1654 and Correggio’s Education of Cupid, now in the National Gallery (NG 10), which was not presented to Philip IV as a result of doubts expressed over its attribution.

Dürer’s self portrait evidently passed into the Spanish royal collection on its arrival in 1654 but the identification of NG 1938 is less certain: the Spanish royal inventories list paintings by Dürer from as early as 1666 (the inventory of the Alcazar palace), including one of a ‘philosopher’ which may be identical with NG 1928. The inventory number 208 painted in red on NG 1938 identifies it with certainty as the painting by Dürer in the Spanish royal inventories from the reign of Philip V in 1747: ‘Ottra en tabla de en Retratto anttigo con una Gorra negra de tres cuartos de Caida y media varia de ancho original de Aluerto Durero’ (‘Another on panel of an old portrait with a black hat three quarters of a yard in height, half a yard wide an original by Albert Durer’).

NG 1938 was owned by Louisa Mackenzie, Lady Ashburton (1827–1903), although it is not recorded until after her death. Lady Ashburton and her husband William Baring, 2nd Lord Ashburton (1799–1864), whom she married as his second wife in 1858, had a large collection of old master paintings, many of which – but not NG 1938 – were shown at the Royal Academy in 1871. A small group of paintings appears to have entered the Ashburton family collections in the mid-nineteenth century following an advance of £170,000 to the Spanish government by Barings bank, and negotiations carried out by Thomas Baring (1799–1873), nephew of the 1st Lord Ashburton. He may have been responsible for the acquisition of at least three paintings which were in the family collections in the late nineteenth century and which were associated by family tradition with a ‘gift from the King of Spain’ of paintings from the Escorial in about 1855. These included Zurbarán’s Saint Margaret of Antioch (now in the National Gallery, NG 1930), Anthonis Mor’s portrait of Mary Tudor and a portrait of Charles V by Jakob Seisenegger and his workshop (both now at Castle Ashby). It is conceivable that NG 1938 was also acquired in Spain by Thomas Baring at this time, and subsequently entered the collection of his cousin.

NG 1938 is not mentioned in Lady Ashburton’s will. After her death, it was sold to the Trustees of the National Gallery with one other picture in 1904 by her executor and son-in-law William, 5th Marquess of Northampton (1851–1913), who had married her daughter Mary (died 1902) in 1884.