Cleveland Museum of Art
St. Jerome Seated near a Pollard Willow
Albrecht DürerLinkedCulture matchlcp-91cf98b472c5
- Date
- 1512
- Medium
- drypoint
- Culture
- Germany
- Department
- Prints
- Institution
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Object ID
- 108103
From LinkedCulture
This is one of only three drypoints Albrecht Dürer ever made, which places it among the rarest works in his entire printed output. Created in 1512, it shows Saint Jerome with hands pressed together in prayer, eyes lifted skyward, his lion resting quietly at his feet and a trimmed pollard willow rising beside him. Dürer scratched a needle directly into copper to produce those soft, velvety lines, giving the wilderness hermitage a warm, almost breathing texture that his precise engravings rarely achieve.
Written by LinkedCulture for its video on this object. Machine-generated (claude-sonnet-4-6), not yet reviewed by a person. It is not part of the museum’s record.
What the image shows
An old man with a long white beard sits at a table in a rocky cave, surrounded by wild plants.
Generated by LinkedCulture from the photograph alone, without the museum’s catalogue text (Qwen/Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct), and not yet reviewed by a person. It describes the picture, not the object’s history, and it is not part of the museum’s record.
From the Cleveland Museum of Art record
Of the hundreds of prints Albrecht Dürer made, only three were drypoints, in which a needle scratched directly into a copperplate creates velvety, fuzzy lines. In this image of Saint Jerome, Dürer exploited these qualities of drypoint to manifest the natural, spiritual realm of the saint’s hermitage in the wilderness. Jerome pauses from his studies to pray in a setting that buzzes with life. The saint’s isolation and communion with Christ result in spiritual rebirth, symbolized by the bumpy pollard (trimmed) willow, cut to generate new growth. This is one of only three prints Albrecht Dürer made using drypoint, in which a needle is scratched directly into the copperplate.
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Provenance & credit
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- Credit line
- Gift of Ralph King
- Provenance
- ?–1925: Ralph King [1855–1926], Cleveland, OH, given to The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH | January 15, 1925–: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
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