A Lucas Cranach the Elder Masterpiece Once Hung in Hitler’s Munich Apartment

Lucas Cranach the Elder‘s Cupid complaining to Venus (1526–27) once hung in the Munich apartment of Adolf Hitler, the Art Newspaper reports.

Now owned by the National Gallery in London, the painting, showing Roman god Cupid complaining to his mother Venus about being stung by bees, can be seen in the center of a blurry, black-and-white photograph dating to the 1940s that was published in a 1978 furniture catalog.

That image was most recently republished in 2023 in the journal Kunstchronik in an article by art historian Birgit Schwarz, who is writing a book on Hitler’s personal art collection. Schwarz had previously confirmed Hitler’s ownership of the painting when she discovered, in 2006, an album at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., containing individual photographs of artworks owned by Hitler, including the Cranach.

The provenance of the painting for much of the 20th century is still murky. Though it was sold at a Berlin auction in 1909, it was bought by an unidentified buyer, according to the Art Newspaper. (The report also notes the sale of a Cranach painting of the same subject, but with slightly different dimensions in 1935.)

The work appears to have been acquired by Hitler by 1935 as George Ward Price, a British journalist and Nazi sympathizer, who recorded having seen a Cranach in his apartment during a March 1936 interview published in his 1937 book I Know These Dictators. Hitler likely acquired the work via a “forced” sale by a Jewish collector or via a seizure of property from a Jewish collector. No restitution claims have been made for the work.  

The painting’s provenance gets even stranger at the end of World War II, per TAN. In either late May or early June, Patricia Lochridge, an American journalist who was a foreign correspondent in Germany during the war, was made mayor for the day of Berchtesgaden, near the Austrian border where Hitler owned a mountain retreat. On this day, she was taken to a warehouse and told she could select an artwork to take back to the US with her; she chose Cranach’s Cupid complaining to Venus.

“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.

Lochridge, who married after the war and took her husband’s surname of Hartwell, originally offered the painting to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1962, but that sale did not go through, according to the Art Newspaper. The National Gallery acquired it in 1963 from A. Silberman Galleries in New York, which told the museum that it had purchased the painting from the heir to the buyer at the 1909 Berlin auction. That was a lie, as Silberman had acquired it from Lochridge.

The National Gallery has said it purchased the painting in good faith and has been transparent about the work’s questionable provenance since 1999. “We continue to welcome any further information relating to the painting as part of this ongoing and longstanding research,” the museum said in a statement.