Portrait of Dürer's Father at 70, 1497 Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Albrecht Dürer also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Portrait of Dürer's Father at 70 is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

A few fingertips emerge at the lower edge of the portrait, almost lost between the heavy sleeves. Above them, folds of ocher-brown cloth spread across the sitter’s body, making his narrow, weathered face seem all the more exposed. His black cap rises in uneven peaks; wisps of gray hair curl out beneath it. The mouth is firmly closed, the eyes alert under a deeply lined brow.

The lettering across the top identifies the man and records his age and the year: Albrecht the Elder, seventy, in 1497. In Portrait of Dürer's Father at 70, the subject is someone who helped shape the artist’s earliest understanding of making things. A goldsmith from Hungary, he established himself in Nuremberg in 1455 and later taught Dürer his trade. That knowledge lends a particular interest to the nearly concealed hands, though the picture offers no tools or workshop setting to announce his profession.

Instead, the portrait gives us cloth, skin, and a surprisingly warm expanse of color. The salmon-pink background is streaked vertically, while the gown gathers into broad, dark folds around the elbows. A black inner garment forms a deep central opening beneath the face. Light picks out the forehead, the long nose, and the creases around the mouth; the shadowed cheek makes the head feel less symmetrical than the broad mass of the clothing below. Nothing in the setting distracts from this sober presence.

Yet the background also raises a question about whose brush made this particular picture. Its color and handling are unlike the artist’s usual practice. Cracks that once formed as a thick paint layer dried, now concealed by restoration, provide another clue. The London National Gallery’s version is therefore probably a late-sixteenth-century copy rather than the original of 1497. It nevertheless traveled to England as a royal gift: in 1636, Nuremberg presented it to the Earl of Arundel for Charles I. Copies of such a celebrated artist were much sought after.

That complicated history sits quietly behind a very direct encounter. The sitter turns slightly to one side without relaxing his expression. His clothing occupies most of the picture, but it is the small, compressed mouth that holds its silence.