MALER, Hans
(b. ca. 1480, Ulm, d. ca. 1529, Schwaz)

Ulrich Fugger the Younger

1525
Oil on panel, 42 x 35 cm
Private collection

The sitter of this portrait was Ulrich Fugger the Younger (1490-1525). He was born into a family that would soon become one of Europe's greatest mercantile and banking dynasties. His father - Ulrich the Elder - and his uncles Georg and Jacob Fugger together founded a flourishing spice- and textile-trading firm in 1494, which under Jacob's leadership became immensely prosperous by expanding into mining and finance. The young Ulrich traveled widely in Central Europe as a representative of the Fugger firm. His final station in life was the mining centre of Schwaz in Tirol. It was surely in Schwaz in 1525 that Hans Maler painted the present portrait.

There is an almost identical other version of the portrait in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York which preceded the present version.

Maler's portraits of Ulrich Fugger represent just one part of his more extensive work for the Fuggers and their close associates in Schwaz, made possible by the increased presence of the Fugger firm in the mining town from 1522 onward. It is conceivable that some were used to decorate the family's new residence and office in Schwaz, the Fuggerhaus, completed about 1525-28.