自画像

He is twenty-two, far from home, and about to be married. In his fingers Dürer holds a small spiky plant whose German name means faithfulness, and above his head he writes that his fate is in God's hands.

The story behind the painting

In 1493 Albrecht Dürer was 22 years old and working in Strasbourg. He had finished his apprenticeship with Michael Wolgemut and his years as a travelling journeyman, and on 7 July 1494 he would marry Agnes Frey. This small painting, oil on parchment later pasted onto canvas, is the earliest of his painted self-portraits, and it has been identified as one of the first self-portraits painted by any Northern artist. The date and the plant in his hand suggest that it may be a betrothal portrait, made around the time of his engagement. The Louvre acquired it in 1922, and it has been in Paris ever since.

What to look for

Dürer looks out at us with a face the source calls psychologically complex, melancholy and reserved, the expression of a serious young man. In his hand he holds a flowering sprig that botanists identify as Eryngium amethystinum, a plant resembling a thistle, which is how the painting got its English title. Beside the date he wrote a line in old German: My affairs follow the course allotted to them on high. The art historian Lawrence Gowing called it the most French of all Dürer's pictures, and noted that the touch is freer and the colour more iridescent than in any other painting by him that one remembers.

Meaning and intent

The plant carries the heart of the meaning. Its German name, Mannestreue, means conjugal fidelity, and during the 15th century thistles were symbols of a man's faithfulness in marriage. So the young painter seems to be offering a promise. The plant may also carry religious meaning: the same plant appears in outline in the gold ground of Dürer's Christ as the Man of Sorrows of 1493-94. The inscription adds a Christian, almost philosophical note. Dürer was inclined to doubt and often studied his own face. Here, as a bridegroom, he places his future in the hands of God.

Legacy

This little painting stands at the start of a lifelong habit: Dürer often analysed his own face in drawn or painted likenesses, sometimes idealising it, sometimes not. In 1805 the poet Goethe saw a copy of the portrait in the museum at Leipzig and described it as being of inestimable value. Today the original, about 56.5 by 44.5 centimetres, hangs in the Louvre. Standing before it, we meet not the famous master he would become but a young man at a turning point, uncertain and hopeful, holding a small token of love and trusting that his life would follow a course set on high.