Portrait of a 34-year-old Woman

Around 1512, in the prosperous merchant towns of the German-speaking lands, well-off traders were starting to do something once reserved for princes and saints: pay a painter to set their own faces on a panel. This is one of those commissions. The sitter is the wife of a merchant named Fischer, and the picture states plainly that she was 34 the year she posed. She once had a companion piece, a portrait of her husband hung beside her and now lost. An old inscription on the frame is what remembers it. On the back of her panel the word Maria is lettered in gold. For a long time no one was sure whose hand this was. It went first to the young Hans Holbein, then to his brother Ambrosius, both painters, and only in 1908 did a specialist argue it belonged instead to their father, Hans Holbein the Elder. She looks straight out at you, steady and unhurried, five centuries on.