Portrait of Oswolt Krel

Oswolt Krel spent only about 18 months in Nuremberg, from January 1499 to August 1500, keeping the books for the Great Ravensburg Trading Company, one of the large South German merchant firms. Albrecht Dürer, then in his late twenties, painted him during that stay. Krel turns sharply toward us, brows drawn, set against a red curtain with a strip of landscape opening at the side. The portrait was made as the centre of a small triptych. On its two wings hairy wild men of the forest hold up coats of arms, Krel's own and his wife's, and the museum notes that such savage figures were believed to be descendants of Cain. The three panels came to Munich in 1828 from the collection of the princes of Oettingen-Wallerstein, and they still hang together.