Hans Hoffmann

In December 1588 the heirs of Willibald Imhoff, a Nuremberg patrician whose family had kept much of Albrecht Dürer's artistic legacy, sold their album of Dürer's works to the emperor Rudolf II in Prague. The go-between was Hans Hoffmann, by then the emperor's court painter. Among the sheets that went to Prague was Dürer's Young Hare of 1502, which is now in the Albertina in Vienna.

Hoffmann had made his name on exactly that material. He is recorded as a painter and citizen of Nuremberg by 1576, and his privileged access to the Imhoff collection let him copy Dürer's studies of animals and plants in watercolour and gouache, and combine them into new pictures. One of his resting hares is signed with Dürer's AD monogram instead of his own initials, and scholars still argue over whether such pieces were homage or forgery.

In 1584 he worked for Duke William V of Bavaria in Munich, and from July 1585 he was court painter in Prague, on 100 thalers a year, also advising the emperor on his collection. He died there in 1591 or 1592, and his year of birth is not known. Much of his work is known from the collection of the Nuremberg merchant Paulus Praun, who owned well over a hundred of his pieces, many of them now lost.