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Portrait of a Man and His Wife

1512 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

portrait

This double portrait represents a man and his wife placed before an off-centre window open to a view of a bucolic landscape. Between them the ages of the couple, 52 and 35, and the date of the painting, 1512, are indicated by trompe-l'oeil inscriptions. They are identified as Lorenz Kraffter, a prominent Augsburg merchant and his wife Honesta Merz.

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Portrait of a Man and His Wife

About the Artist

Ulrich the Elder Apt

1460 – 1522

German painter, together with his son active in Augsburg, which alongside Nuremberg was one of the leading centres of artistic production in 16th-century Germany. (From Augsburg came important artistic families such as the Holbeins.) Ulrich Apt the Elder painted many portraits, mostly in the style of Hans Holbein the Elder, and several have been confused with Holbein the Younger 's. There are pictures by him in Augsburg, Florence (Uffizi), Munich and Vienna, and there are two replicas of A Man and his Wife, 1512, in the Royal Collection, Windsor, and New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art).

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