Porträt der Barbara Holper

In 1490 Albrecht Dürer was 19 and about to leave Nuremberg as a journeyman, and before he went he painted his father and his mother as a matching pair. This is the mother, Barbara Holper, then around 39. She bore 18 children and buried most of them in infancy, and Dürer set that hard life down plainly in her face, with none of the flattery a paid commission would have required. The two panels drifted apart after 1628, and hers was taken for lost until a scholar recognised it again in 1977. The father's half survives elsewhere, and the couple were only briefly reunited for a Nuremberg exhibition in 2012.