Wow! A friend of mine has a connection with this story, which I had scanned briefly via RSS/newsfeed a few days ago. Thus when she mentioned it, I recognized the painting immediately.
Just as an aside, I love the hat. Every naked lady should wear one.
Britain’s National Gallery announced Thursday that new research has disclosed that a painting in its collection, “Cupid Complaining to Venus,” by the German Renaissance artist Lucas Cranach the Elder, was once part of Hitler’s private collection.
“We’ve never had anything like this before,” said museum spokesman Thomas Almeroth-Williams. “It’s incredibly rare.”
The museum is investigating to determine the exact provenance of the painting, which was painted in about 1525, with particular emphasis on whether it might have been looted from Jewish owners by the Nazis.
So far, Almeroth-Williams said, the museum’s experts have been unable to account for the painting’s ownership or whereabouts from 1909, when it was sold at auction in Berlin, to 1945, when U.S. soldiers allowed a U.S. war correspondent to remove it from a warehouse of art they were guarding in southern Germany.
A researcher, Birgit Schwartz, who has been studying Hitler’s art collecting, spotted the painting in a photograph of Hitler’s private gallery contained in an album at the Library of Congress in Washington.
My friend Debbie has been working to catalogue the Third Reich photo album collections at the “LC,” and this researcher Birgit Schwartz was thus able to spot the painting and make the link to Hitler’s collection of possibly stolen art. The painting’s later history was almost as colorful, as it was given to a female war correspondent who had a distinguished career before retiring to Hawaii.
Another article with different information appeared in Friday’s Guardian newspaper in London. Curators there contacted curators here and are now sorting it all out. I just catalog ’em. This album has been in the collection for a long time and was mentioned in a bibliography published in 2000. I made the online public catalog record for it back in November of 2004.
