Portrait of a Man and His Wife

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.

Two other nearly identical versions of the painting exist, one in the Royal Collection, Windsor and another in an English private collection. The three paintings are supposedly executed by different hands. The version in the Metropolitan is the one most clearly by Apt himself.