1514, her son wrote "This my pious Mother ... often had the plague and many other severe and strange illnesses, and she suffered great poverty, scorn, contempt, mocking words, terrors, and great adversities. Yet she bore no malice. Also she died hard ... I felt so grieved for her that I cannot express it." Barbara is shown wearing a red dress and a matte white bonnet which fully covers her hair, indicating her marital status. Her headdress is draped with a long scarf or train which stretches down her neck and across her left shoulder, contrasting in colour and shape against the black headwear of her husband. The lines of her face contain touches of white paint to give a highlighting and enlivening effect; they are especially evident around her eyes, the bridge of her nose and around her upper lip. Barbara was attractive in her youth; her son described her as having been "comely and of erect bearing". However, by the time of this portrait the effects of time and losing so many children weigh heavily on her face. The panel was grounded with white paint, while the composition seems to have changed significantly from the imprimatura. Faint traces of the original figuration are visible in parts of the background and in the darkened areas of her hood. At some point the panel was cut down at the left side, shifting the compositional balance and removing a portion of her shoulder and headdress. The panel closely resembles Dürer's 1514 drawing Portrait of the artist's mother at the age of 63. David Price writes of the drawing's "rough depiction of her flesh emaciated by old age", and the "existential piety in the cast of Barbara Dürer's right eye, which, almost unnaturally, directs her vision heavenward". Although Barbara is some 25 years older in the later drawing and by then terminally ill, the facial resemblance and pose are unmistakable. However, there is a dramatic difference between the relatively young looking 39-year-old woman in the diptych and the aged and terminally ill widow in the 1514 drawing. A family resemblance can be detected between both works and Dürer's Vienna self-portrait; most evidently around the mouth. Kemperdick concludes that these passages are so closely modeled that it is reasonable to presume they were drawn by the same hand, but is conservative in saying definitively that the sitters were related by blood, as Dürer