LOCHNER, STEPHAN. - German painter, born at Meersburg on Lake Constance; he lived and worked in Cologne, where he is recorded as active from 1442 until his death, which occurred in 1451, apparently in the city’s poorhouse. From 1447 to 1450 he was elected to the council of the painters’ confraternity. Dürer, as is known from one of his pupils, greatly admired the Cathedral altarpiece, regarded by the townspeople as the masterpiece of local painting. This information made it possible to identify the painter with Master Stephan of Cologne.
His only dated work is the Presentation in the Temple in the Darmstadt Picture Gallery, of 1447. His activity seems to have increased during the last decade of his life and can be reconstructed through various panels preserved in German museums, such as the Madonna with the Violet, preceding 1443, the Nativity in the Diocesan Museum, and the Last Judgment in St. Lawrence’s, Cologne, later than 1446 (part of which is also in the museums of Munich and Frankfurt). Less late, on the other hand, would be the Crucifixion and the Madonna of the Rose Garden in the Munich Picture Gallery. Although considered one of the foremost representatives of the Cologne school, L. differs markedly from his contemporaries through a more immediate and more balanced sense of nature, fostered by his contacts with Flemish and French painting, through a poetic use of light and colour, and through a clear and effective compositional precision.