Købmanden med sin kone

Marinus van Reymerswale belongs to the Antwerp generation that turned the half-length figure at table — the money changer, the tax collector, the man of business with his ledger — into one of the most widely repeated subjects of the northern Renaissance, and this panel is among the finest versions of it. The pairing of such a man with his wife was the painter’s signature invention, and its currency in the sixteenth century lay in the moral question it raised about money, office and domestic life: the scene invited the buyer to read judgement into an image of prosperity. The panel is dated 1540 and was already in the Danish royal collection by 1759, one of the old master paintings gathered in Copenhagen in the age of Frederik V. The painting is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).