Art history: questioning a picture

A German catalogue entry answers three questions in a fixed order: whose hand, whose hands since, and what the picture shows. One word on this page will mislead an English reader almost every time. Das Pendant is not a piece of jewellery; it is the picture made to hang beside another, most often the portrait of a wife painted to face her husband’s. Both languages took the word from French, where it simply means « hanging », but in everyday English a pendant hangs round somebody’s neck, while in German it hangs opposite. The jewellery is der Anhänger, and outside the museum das Pendant means a counterpart of any kind, as in das deutsche Pendant zu diesem Amt. So when a label says a portrait hat ein Pendant, it is telling you that the picture is half of a pair, and that the other half may now hang in another city.