Nicolas de Neufchâtel, 'Susanna Stefan, Wife of Wolfgang Furter', early 1560s

The demure young woman in this portrait is Susanna Stefan of Nuremberg, and the picture may well have been painted around the time of her marriage to Wolfgang Furter, probably along with a pendant portrait of her husband. It is possible that this portrait still exists and may one day be recognised.

A very damaged and much retouched Latin inscription in the top right corner possibly gives her age as 18 and a date in the 1560s; the last number is illegible. In the same corner is a crest with two coats of arms topped by the half figure of a bearded man who holds an object, probably an arrow, in his left hand. The arms are those of the Furter and Stefan families, which appear on the epitaph for Wolfgang Furter and his wife Susanna Stefan in the cemetery of St John in Nuremberg. We know something about the couple from the epitaph and from an eighteenth-century manuscript. Wolfgang was an official of the Office of Alms, and he and Susanna were ‘rich and respected’ but not of the first rank of society. Susanna was described in the epitaph as ‘honourable and virtuous’. An engraving by Cornelius Nicolaus Schurtz after a lost portrait of him gives his age as 56 in 1594, the year of his death. He was therefore born in about 1538; his wife may have been a little younger. They had no children.

Susanna is richly but modestly dressed, with plaited hair and a black hat, a high-necked white shirt decorated with red embroidery and a dress of watered red silk with crimson velvet facings and fur cuffs. The embroidered panel over her breast is worked in silver and gold thread and decorated with small gems. She has gold necklaces – one with an elaborate pendant – a gold belt, and silver and gold rings set with stones. At least nine other portraits, all apparently by Nicolas de Neufchâtel, show women similarly dressed. The government of Nuremberg regulated the lives of the city’s inhabitants rather strictly – they may have become used to conformity of dress as in other matters. The hands in a number of the portraits are similar, showing that Nicholas used stock poses. Most of his women crane their necks forward but retract their chins and clasp their hands, making them look submissive and modest, while his men tend to gesticulate.