National Gallery Cranach Was Once in Hitler’s Apartment, New Research Shows
A painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder now hanging in the National Gallery in London has surfaced with a provenance that is as tangled as it is revealing. Cupid complaining to Venus (1526–27) once hung in Adolf Hitler’s Munich apartment, according to research reported by The Art Newspaper and reinforced by a trail of photographs and postwar transfers that stretch from Berlin to Berchtesgaden to New York.
The work’s Nazi-era connection was supported by a blurry black-and-white photograph from the 1940s that appeared in a 1978 furniture catalog. That image was republished in 2023 in Kunstchronik in an article by art historian Birgit Schwarz, who is writing a book on Hitler’s personal art collection. Schwarz had already confirmed Hitler’s ownership in 2006, after finding an album at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. containing individual photographs of artworks owned by Hitler, including the Cranach.
The painting’s earlier history remains incomplete. It was sold at a Berlin auction in 1909, but the buyer was unidentified. A separate Cranach of the same subject, with slightly different dimensions, was also sold in 1935. By 1936, the work appears to have been in Hitler’s possession: George Ward Price, a British journalist and Nazi sympathizer, wrote that he saw a Cranach in Hitler’s apartment during a March 1936 interview later published in his 1937 book I Know These Dictators.
Scholars believe Hitler likely acquired the painting through a forced sale or a seizure from a Jewish collector. No restitution claims have been made.
The work’s postwar journey is no less unusual. In either late May or early June, Patricia Lochridge, an American journalist who had been a foreign correspondent in Germany during the war, was made mayor for the day of Berchtesgaden, near the Austrian border where Hitler had a mountain retreat. She was taken to a warehouse and told she could choose an artwork to bring back to the United States. She selected Cranach’s Cupid complaining to Venus and later smuggled it into the country, according to her son, Jay Hartwell.
Lochridge, who later took her husband’s surname, first offered the painting to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1962, but that deal did not go through. The National Gallery acquired the work in 1963 from A. Silberman Galleries in New York, which told the museum it had purchased the painting from the heir to the buyer at the 1909 Berlin auction. That account was false; Silberman had acquired it from Lochridge.
The National Gallery says it bought the painting in good faith and has been transparent about its 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.
