due to arthritis. 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." Albrecht retains some of the handsomeness of his youth; he has strong bone structure with the high cheek-bones characteristic of the Slav and Magyar blood in Hungarian appearance. He has almost exotic eyes, which approach his temples in an almost eastern way. Provenance and attribution There is strong evidence that the portrait was originally hung alongside Dürer's 1498 Self-portrait. Both are of the same dimensions and show the subject at half length. In 1650 the city of Nuremberg gave the pair of portraits to Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel as a present to King Charles I of England, at a time when Dürer was regarded as the city's proudest son. Both were later sold by Cromwell. Albrecht the Elder's portrait was eventually acquired by the National Gallery in 1904, where is bears the Inventory number NG1938. The self-portrait was bought by the Museo del Prado in Madrid. When the National Gallery bought the painting, they had little information about its attribution or provenance. A piece of a paper label was found on the reverse which was believed to have dated from the 17th century, and was similar to another found on the back of Dürer's 1498 self-portrait. 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". These discoveries lead to the belief that it was the Dürer painting recorded in Charles I possession. Gallery References Notes Sources Allen, Jessie. Albrecht Dürer. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2005. Bailey, Martin. Dürer. London: Phidon Press, 1995. Conway, Martin. "Dürer Portraits, Notes". The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Volume 33, No. 187, October 1918. 142–143 Brion, Marcel. Dürer. London: Thames and Hudson, 1960. Campbell Hutchison, Jane. Albrecht Dürer: A Guide to Research. New York: Garland, 2000. Foister, Susan. Dürer's Nuremberg Legacy: