Detail of a Portrait of a Woman by Bernhard Strigel in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, February 2014

Portrait of a Woman
ca. 1510–15


Object Details

Artist: Bernhard Strigel (German, Memmingen 1460–1528 Memmingen)

Date: ca. 1510–15

Medium: Oil on linden

Dimensions: 15 1/8 x 10 1/2 in. (38.4 x 26.7 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: Purchase, 1871

Accession Number: 71.34


Bernhard Strigel belonged to a family of artists that flourished after the middle of the fifteenth century in the town of Memmingen, near the Swiss border. In the first two decades of the sixteenth century he produced a number of portraits of ladies in extravagant dress positioned before a decorative brocade hanging with an open window view out to a landscape. The young woman in this (probably independent) portrait has not been identified, but her elaborate costume, with its imported fabrics and embroideries and ostentatious jewelry, places her among the elite echelons of society.

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437759