Portrait of a Man and His Wife

For a long time this pair of panels was read as a private confession. Visitors were told the man was the Antwerp painter Quentin Massys and the woman his wife, that the painter had set down himself and the person he lived beside. Scholars later took those names away and gave the two portraits to another Antwerp hand, Joos van Cleve, and the couple slipped back into being simply a husband and wife whose names are lost. They were painted around 1520, in the city that had just become the trading capital of northern Europe, where a prosperous merchant and his wife would order portraits like these to hang side by side and face each other. Each panel is small, a little over half a metre high. In these years van Cleve made at least one other such pair, the merchant Joris Vezeleer and his wife Margaretha, now far away in Washington.