DÜRER, Albrecht
(b. 1471, Nürnberg, d. 1528, Nürnberg)

Felicitas Tucher, née Rieter

1499
Oil on panel, 28 x 24 cm
Schlossmuseum, Weimar

The panel is the right side of a diptych that includes the portrait of her husband Hans. Inscription in the top right, by someone else(?): FELITZ. HANS. TUCHERIN, 33 JOR. ALT. SALUS. In 1824, the two portraits were included in the inventory of the museum in the Jägerhaus of Weimar. After 1918, they were passed from the grand dukes to the museum.

It was commissioned in the same year as the diptych of Nicolas and Elsbeth Tucher (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Kassel). They had approximately the same composition because Wolgemut, Dürer's master, had already done portraits of the members of the Tucher family years before. Even the setting of the portraits is very similar. The presence of an embroidered curtain in the background, the almost identical landscape passage seen through the windows, and lastly, the windowsill set equal spatial limits to the portraits. The foreshortenings of the landscape passage are imaginative and mannered, showing roads, lakes, and mountains. On the road, in the landscape behind the man's portrait, one discerns a wayfarer; on the path, in the woman's portrait, a man on horseback. The same clouds are seen in the clear sky behind the man, as in the wife's portrait, and in Elsbeth Tucher's.

Felicitas holds a carnation, with a bud and a flower. Her plump face is turned to the left, but her gaze, with slightly melancholic eyes, looks to the right. Like her sister-in-law, she wears a gold chain around her neck, and the waistcoat, according to custom, is held by a buckle , which is engraved with the initials of her consort, H. T.