As part of the Royal Collection, the City Treasurer and his Wife (the so-called Money Changer and his Wife) is one of the few paintings by Marinus in Spain that can be traced to the eighteenth century, and one which played a decisive role in the rediscovery of the painter’s work. However, when it was first recorded in the collection of Isabel Farnesio in 1746 it was attributed to Lucas de Olanda (Lucas van Leyden, 1494-1533). A first attempt to decipher the signature was made in 1843, but it was only twenty years later that it was connected with Marinus van Reymerswale, the painter mentioned by Carel van Mander in 1604. By the eighteenth century, it was described as the representation of Avarice by Antonio Ponz, who interpreted it as an allegorical depiction of that capital sin.

The outlandish headdresses further underscored the negative interpretation of the painting in the past. Whereas they distanced the figures from their contemporary viewers, the coins on the table, which came from different parts of Western Europe, did not. Minted at different times, they highlight the growing importance of the large silver coins that transformed the international monetary market of the sixteenth century. Identifiable are the ten cruzados of Manuel I of Portugal; the four excelentes of the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand II of Aragón and Isabella I of Castile, minted in Segovia; the French écu d’or de soleil, which was used during the reigns of Charles VIII and Louis XII; the Bohemian silver Joachimsthaler with the double-tailed lion on its reverse; and the Snaphaan, the first large silver coin issued in the Netherlands in 1508 by Charles II of Egmond, Duke of Guelders. They can be understood as an allusion to economic powers expressed through a monetary policy that was negotiated on the level of centralised governments but had a real effect on local prices and wages. The account book contains a list of life annuities given in the local unit of account, the papers on the shelf another only partly readable record of annuities, which also appears in the St Petersburg City Treasurer (so-called Two Tax Collectors) (inv. 423). Keith Moxey suggested that the focus on these annuity payments would make the man verifying the weight of the coins a city agent or treasurer, and that the painting may have been intended for an audience familiar with capital investment. The contents of the inscriptions allow for a more precise identification of the man weighing coins as a city treasurer, who would then also have been responsible for the verification of the value of foreign currencies.

Technical examination of the painting revealed the use of a tracing to transfer the composition onto the panel. Initially, the woman wore a different headdress with a loose fabric draped underneath her chin and tied next to her temple in an ornamental knot. During the painting process, the design was changed into a cap covered with a white cloth that falls over her shoulders. Neither of the female headdresses was typical in the Netherlands at the time but recall Southern German fashion. Marinus, who was familiar with the prints of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), most likely copied the accessory from a woodcut by the German artist (Christine Seidel in Marinus. Painter from Reymerswale, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2021, pp. 104-106).