The Organ Player and His Wife, ca. 1490

About the Work

The theme of this engraving is marital harmony. A bourgeois couple are engaged in joint musicmaking at a table organ. Their faithful dog at their side, the wife operates the bellows while her husband plays the melody. The scene depicts the milieu of the educated town citizenry to which the purchasers of such engravings would likely have belonged. That may explain the evidently great popularity of this print. It has come down to us in an unusually large number of copies.