Portrait of Oswolt Krel

Durer painted this in 1499, when the sitter, Oswolt Krel, was working in Nuremberg as the local head of the Great Ravensburg Trading Company, one of the big German merchant firms of the day. Krel meets your eye with an almost startling intensity, brows drawn, against a red curtain and a strip of woodland. The portrait came with two narrow wing panels, each showing a hairy wild man of the forest holding up a family coat of arms, the Krels' and his bride's. Durer was not yet 30 and freshly back from Italy, trying out on a young merchant the searching gaze German painters usually saved for saints. The portrait and its two wings still hang together in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.