Portrait of Oswolt Krel: "Sylvan Men" with Heraldic Shields of Oswolt Krel

In January 1499 Oswolt Krel came to Nuremberg to keep the books of the Große Ravensburger Handelsgesellschaft, one of the big trading companies of southern Germany. He stayed 19 months, and inside that window he commissioned a portrait from Albrecht Dürer, then 27 and running his own workshop in the city. This tall strip of limewood, about 50 centimetres high and 16 wide, is one of the two wings that folded shut over that portrait. The hairy figure on it is a wild man, the sort of shield-bearer German heraldry used constantly, and the shield he holds carries Krel's own arms. The other wing carries the arms of his wife, Agatha von Essendorf. During the 19th century the wings were taken off the portrait and the connection was forgotten. From 1877 to 1910 they sat in Nuremberg on loan to the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, with no inventory number and nobody aware of what they had been attached to.