Hitler’s Munich Apartment Photograph Reopens the Provenance of a National Gallery Cranach
A newly identified photograph has added a crucial piece to the long, unsettled history of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Cupid complaining to Venus. The early 1940s image shows the painting hanging in Adolf Hitler’s private apartment at 16 Prinzregentenplatz in Munich, offering the strongest evidence yet that Hitler likely acquired it around 1935.
The photograph is significant not only because it places the work inside Hitler’s residence, but because it helps narrow a period that has remained opaque for decades. A contemporaneous clue already existed: in 1937, the British journalist and fascist sympathiser George Ward Price wrote that Hitler had “recently acquired a Cranach and two Bruegels for his Munich flat.” Taken together, the written reference and the photograph point to the mid-1930s as the likely moment the painting entered Hitler’s collection.
The National Gallery bought Cupid complaining to Venus in 1963 from E. and A. Silberman Galleries in New York. Susan Foister, the museum’s recently retired curator, said the dealer supplied “a false provenance.” Abris Silberman, the gallery’s co-founder, had claimed the painting had sold at auction in 1909 and then passed by inheritance to the seller. That account was untrue.
The only secure earlier point in the painting’s history is its 1909 auction in Berlin, where it was bought by an unidentified dealer. What happened after that remains unclear. Researchers still do not know who owned the work in the 1930s, or whether it was seized from a Jewish collector or sold under pressure.
The painting’s postwar journey is no less unusual. In 1945, Patricia Lochridge, then a 29-year-old journalist writing from Germany for Woman’s Home Companion, was invited to Berchtesgaden, near the Austrian border, where American forces had recovered art. Her son, Jay Hartwell, later told the National Gallery that she was told she could choose any work she wanted from a warehouse and then smuggled the Cranach into the United States.
The photograph itself surfaced in an unexpected place: a 1978 Hermann Historica auction catalogue in Munich, where it was reproduced to authenticate shelves being sold with a Hitler provenance. It went unnoticed at the time that the Cranach appeared in the corner of the room. Birgit Schwarz later identified the painting and published her findings in German in Kunstchronik in December 2023.
The National Gallery says it has been fully open about the painting’s lack of a proper Nazi-era provenance since 1999 and continues to welcome further information. For museums, collectors, and researchers, the case is a reminder that a single image can still alter the chronology of a work’s ownership — and expose how much of the 20th century remains embedded in the objects that survived it.
