"The good citizens of Nuremberg continued their work of converting Durer's works into hard cash whenever the opportunity occurred. In 1585 the Town Council persuaded or compelled the governors of the Landauer almshouses to sell to the Emperor Rudolph their great painting of _All Saints_, replacing it by a copy which, by way of carrying out the deception, was inserted in the original frame designed by Durer. The _Adam and Eve_ also appear to have passed into the same Imperial hands. In 1627 the Council sold to the Elector Maximilian of Bavaria the two great panels of the _Four Preachers_, Durer's last gift to his native town, and replaced them by copies. The long inscriptions from the Bible were cut off from the original panels and added on below the copies. A few years before, in 1613, they had presented the same Elector with the beautiful Baumgärtner altar-piece, which was torn from its place in St. Catherine's Church at Nuremberg. The two _Descents from the Cross_ followed in the same channel: and the Praun collection at Nuremberg yielded up the portrait of Wolgemut and the portrait of Hans Durer. Worst of all, the portrait of their beloved and honoured citizen, the world-famous portrait of Durer by himself, which had become actually the property of the Town Council, was lent by them to a local painter to copy; this ingenious craftsman sawed the panel in half, and glued his copy on to the back, on which were the town seal and other marks of ownership, and sold the original to King Ludwig of Bavaria. The worthy magistrates never discovered the fraud, or pretended not to, and this copy hangs to-day at Nuremberg a monument of dishonour and fraud. Gradually Nuremberg divested itself of every work by Durer which it could, and rejoiced in its copies and its cash. Ludwig I. of Bavaria took pity on its denuded condition, and gave back to it as a gift the _Descent from the Cross_, known as the Peller altar-piece, and also apparently returned from Schleissheim the _Hercules and the Stymphalian Birds_. With the overdaubed paintings of Charlemagne and Sigismund, these appear to be the only authenticated paintings by Durer in his native town at the present day. Three hundred years after Durer's death, a statue was erected to him in Nuremberg, and his house is now preserved and shown as a national relic. Yet little more than fifty years after the erection of this statue, in 1884, the citizens allowed the famous 'Holzschuher' portrait, the last great work by Durer which the town possessed, to be sold by the family, to whom it still belonged, to the Munich Gallery. Truly a prophet hath little honour in his own country!"