Portrait of Dürer's Father at 70

The sitter's similarity to the earlier portrait, as well to a 1486 silverpoint drawing believed to be a self-portrait by his father, leave no doubt as to his identity.

He was supportive of his son's precocious talent and recognised it from an early age, sending him to apprenticeship with Michael Wolgemut, one of the highest regarded painters in Nuremberg at the time.

From his travels Albrecht senior came into contact with the second generation of Netherlandish Renaissance painters, and through them passed on a key influence on his son's artistic development.

Following his father's death, the artist wrote an affecting eulogy in which he said that in his life the older man "underwent manifold afflictions, trials and adversities.

[5] Following his father's death five years after this portrait was painted, Dürer wrote that Albrecht the elder "passed his life in great toil and stern hard labour, having nothing for his support save what he earned with his hand for himself, his wife and his children so that he had little enough.

But he won just praise from all who knew him for he lived an honourable Christian life, was a man patient of spirit, mild and peaceable to all and very thankful to God.

[8][9] From his father, Dürer learned to appreciate the fine, almost forensic, attention to realistic detail favoured by the northern painters, as well as their use of brilliant colour.

Compared to his mild and pious expression in the 1490 portrait, Albrecht now seems impatient, while in the words of Marcel Brion, the "stunned look in his eyes seems already to foresee his own death...[the] almost haggard intensity of [his] questioning gaze [is] directed upon those about him as if they could solve the urgent problems to which his own set lips had no answer.

"[12] Albrecht retains some of the handsomeness of his youth; he has a strong bone structure with the high cheekbones characteristic of the Slav and Magyar blood in Hungarian appearance.

In addition, they noted the sitter's resemblance to the 1490 portrait and 1486 assumed self-portrait and found a 1639 inventory record which described a portrait of his father as wearing a black hat and wearing "a dark yellow gown wherein his hands are hidden in the wide sleeves painted upon a reddish ground all crack’t".