Purely technically considered this picture appears to be immeasurably above his own portrait of 1500, and above any other excepting the marvellous works of 1526. Whoever this Hans Imhof was, Dürer has laid bare his very soul. These later portraits show that Dürer stood on the threshold of the modern world. [Illustration: PLATE VIII.--SS. PAUL AND MARK (From an Oil-painting in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Finished in 1526) See Note preceding Plate VII.] Hieronymus Holzschuer is another of Dürer's strikingly successful efforts to portray both form and mind, and although the colour of the man's face is of a conventional pink, yet the pale blue background, the white hair, the pink flesh, and the glaring eyes stamp themselves indelibly on the mind of the beholder, much to the detriment of the other picture in the Berlin Gallery, Jacob Muffel. Jacob Muffel, contrary to Jerome Holzschuer, looks a miser, a hypocrite, and the more unpleasant, as he does not by any means look a fool. But Dürer's craftsmanship here exceeds that of the Holzschuer portrait, whom we love for the sake of his display of white hair and flaming eyes. The enigma to me is how a man who had painted the three last portraits mentioned, could have fallen to the level of the "Madonna with the Apple" of the same year. The finest portrait under his name is the "Portrait of a Woman" at Berlin. This indeed is a brilliant piece of portraiture, absolutely modern in feeling, exceeding Holbein; and unless my eyes, which have not rested upon its surface for over ten years, deceive me, it is quite unlike any portrait painted by him before--the nearest perhaps being the man's portrait at Munich of 1507. The picture is supposed to show Venetian influence, and might therefore belong to this epoch; but, to my thinking, documentary evidence alone could make this picture in its not Dürer-like mode of seeing an undoubted work from his hand. Space forbids further enumeration, further discussion of his work. As to details of his biography the reader will find in almost every library some reliable records of his life, and several inexpensive books have also appeared of recent years. Dürer's life was in reality uneventful. He died suddenly on April 6, 1528, in Nuremberg, having in all probability laid the foundations of his illness on his celebrated journey into Flanders in 1520-21, where he was fêted everywhere, and right royally received both by the civic authorities and his own brothers of the palette.