Portrait of a clean-shaven man with a fur hat and fur collar [Verso]

This 1514 portrait verso — a portrait painted on the reverse of another panel — is a rare survival demonstrating the practice of double-sided painting common in the early 16th century. The Kunsthalle Bremen's panel shows a clean-shaven man in a fur hat and fur collar, typical elements of prosperous bourgeois or minor aristocratic dress in early 16th-century Germany. Fur was expensive and its display was socially coded — the collar indicated sufficient wealth to afford luxury materials. Cranach's court position put him in contact with exactly such patrons: merchants, minor officials, and members of the Saxon nobility who sought status-affirming portraits.

Cranach renders the fur collar with characteristic German precision — individual hairs and tonal gradations within the fur expressed through fine, directed brushstrokes — while the face is modelled with the controlled, smooth paint handling of his portrait type. The flat, plain background of early Northern portrait convention is maintained.