This Renaissance Painting Took a Winding Path From Hitler’s Munich Apartment to an American Journalist’s Home to the National Gallery in London

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent Add as preferred source Cupid Complaining to Venus, Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1526-1527 National Gallery Picture Library An overlooked photograph from an old German auction book has shed new light on the mysterious history of a painting at London’s National Gallery. Discovered in a furniture catalog from 1978, the grainy black and white image—captured sometime in the early 1940s—appears innocuous at first. It features an upscale sitting room with a chandelier and matching furniture set before a fireplace mantle. On the far wall, angled slightly askew beside a tall door, a painting hangs. But this is not just any painting. The artwork is Cupid Complaining to Venus, an early-16th-century masterpiece by German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder. Nor is this just any Munich apartment. Prinzregentenplatz 16 was once Adolf Hitler’s home, paid for with help from the publishers of his dark manifesto Mein Kampf, reports the Times of London’s David Sanderson. The painting’s appearance in the 1978 catalog was overlooked until recently, when art historian Birgit Schwarz spotted it while researching Hitler’s personal art collection. The clue is the strongest link yet between the German dictator and the Cranach painting. But how Hitler acquired the artwork, and what happened to it between the fall of Nazi Germany and its 1963 acquisition by the National Gallery, is a story that is still being unraveled. “We continue to welcome any further information relating to the painting as part of this ongoing and longstanding research,” a gallery spokesperson says in a statement, per the Times. Cupid Complaining to Venus is an evocative painting with overt themes of lust. It features the cherub Cupid, the god of erotic love, with a stolen honeycomb in hand. He has been stung by vengeful bees and is complaining to his nude mother, Venus, the goddess of love. But rather than attend to her son, Venus stares directly at the viewer with an expectant look. The apple tree that frames her figure evokes the biblical Garden of Eden, in which Eve ate the forbidden fruit. The painting “shows Cranach at his best, when he was working at the Saxon court,” Susan Foister, then the National Gallery’s director of collections, told the Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins in 2008. “There’s the beautiful, almost naked woman with her wonderful plumed hat, the fabulous landscape in the background and the delightful little figure of Cupid in the foreground.” The painting was sold at auction in Berlin in 1909, but little else has been confirmed about its history and what path it took to Hitler. Several clues suggest he may have acquired it around 1935, perhaps through a forced sale, or through outright seizure from a Jewish collector, the Art Newspaper’s Martin Bailey reports. Later in the 1930s, British journalist George Ward Price—who said he visited Hitler’s home—noted that Hitler “recently acquired a Cranach and two Bruegels for his Munich flat.” And several years ago, Schwarz found an album of photos of Hitler’s art collection, which included a photo of Cupid Complaining to Venus. One of the reasons Hitler seized artworks, especially from Jewish families, was to fill a new museum he envisioned creating in Linz, Austria. Inventories and other records suggest that thousands of looted objects were intended for the institution, which was never built. As for how the painting got to London, that’s a strange story. In 1945, after the end of World War II, American reporter Patricia Lochridge was named “mayor for a day” of Berchtesgaden, near the border with Austria. “How would you meet the problems of a wrecked German town? I tried it for a day,” Lochridge wrote of the experience for Woman’s Home Companion, the Art Newspaper reports. In the village of Unterstein, where Hitler stored more than 1,000 stolen works, perhaps intended to one day fill a new museum of his own creation, Lochridge wrote, “As governor, I found I was also responsible for the safety of Göring’s $100m worth of stolen art.” This duty was rewarded, apparently, with a souvenir. “My mother was told she could go into the warehouse and pick out whichever piece she wanted. She then smuggled the painting into the United States,” Jay Hartwell, Lochridge’s son, told the National Gallery in 2004, Art News’ Maximilíano Durón reports. Eventually Silberman Galleries in New York acquired the painting, then sold it to the National Gallery in London but allegedly fudged its provenance, the Art Newspaper reports. Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal. Email Powered by Salesforce Marketing Cloud (Privacy Notice / Terms & Conditions)

This Renaissance Painting Took a Winding Path From Hitler’s Munich Apartment to an American Journalist’s Home to the National Gallery in London

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