Portrait of the Painter Jobst Seyfrid

The letters at the top, R and F, are Frueauf's monogram, and the Belvedere counts him among the first painters in the German-speaking lands to sign his work. The man beneath them was a painter too. An inscription on the back of the panel names him as Jobst Seyfrid, and records place him in Passau, the Danube city where Frueauf ran a busy workshop. So this is one craftsman looking closely at another, on a panel only about 25 centimetres tall. Seyfrid is turned three-quarters, long brown hair falling from under a red cap with a turned-up edge, his grey-green eyes looking past us. He wears a white shirt striped in orange under a loose grey coat, and his shadow falls on the olive-green wall behind him.