(b ?Meersburg, ?c.1415; d Cologne, ?1451). German painter. The works associated with him have long been regarded as the finest paintings produced in Cologne in the mid-15th century, but there has recently been some doubt about the artist's identity. A painter called Stefan Lochner is first documented in Cologne in 1442 and evidently died there in 1451, but there are no signed or documented works by him. In 1520 Dürer visited the city and saw ‘with wonder and astonishment’ an unspecified altarpiece by ‘Master Stefan’. This altarpiece is usually identified as a large triptych of the Adoration of the Magi, painted for Cologne's town hall but now in the city's cathedral, and the ‘Master Stefan’ has been assumed to be Lochner. However, certain works attributed to the same hand as the altarpiece are now thought to date from after 1451, Lochner's date of death.