Portrait of Jakob Meyer zum Pfeil of Basel

In 1511 Basel was a prosperous city on the Rhine, its money made from trade, printing and the cloth business. This portrait shows a young man from one of those merchant families, Jakob Meyer of the branch known as 'zum Pfeil', named for the arrow on the family's house sign. He is easily confused with a different Jakob Meyer, called 'zum Hasen', the mayor whom Holbein later painted, but the two belonged to separate families. The picture is given to an artist in the circle of Hans Baldung Grien, a former pupil of Dürer then working on the Upper Rhine. The sitter did not have long to live. He was dead before 1515, still in his early twenties.