A portrait by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his workshop will be auctioned at Christie’s in January 2025 after a museum in Pennsylvania reached a settlement with the heirs of the former Jewish owner, who sold the painting during the Nazi era and fled to the US.
The Allentown Art Museum acquired Portrait of George the Bearded, Duke of Saxony (around 1534) from the Wildenstein gallery in New York in 1961 and it has been on display at the museum ever since. But before the outbreak of the Second World War, the portrait was owned by Henry Bromberg, a Jewish judge living in Hamburg who had inherited his father’s collection of Old Masters and furnishings.
The painting remained at Bromberg’s Hamburg home until at least 1935. Its journey from there cannot be traced until December 1938, when the Paris dealer Allen Loebl wrote that he had acquired “the Bromberg collection”, including the Cranach.
The details remain murky, but there is little room for doubt that the context of the loss was escape from persecution: in September 1938, Henry and Hertha Bromberg fled Nazi Germany after being ordered to pay the punitive Reichsfluchtsteuer (flight tax) imposed on Jewish emigrants. They travelled to the US, via Switzerland and Le Havre, to join their four sons.
“This work of art entered the market and eventually found its way to the museum only because Henry Bromberg had to flee persecution from Nazi Germany,” Max Weintraub, the president and chief executive of the Allentown Art Museum, said in a statement. “That moral imperative compelled us to act. We hope that this voluntary act by the museum will inform and encourage similar institutions to reach fair and just solutions.”
Bromberg’s heirs have also recovered two paintings from the French government: a 16th-century Flemish portrait and a 16th-century triptych of the crucifixion. They are still seeking around 90 objects listed as missing on the German Lost Art database. “We are pleased that another painting from our grandparents’ art collection was identified and are satisfied that the Allentown Art Museum carefully and responsibly checked the provenance of the portrait,” the family said in a statement.
Weintraub says the heirs’ representative, the Berlin lawyer Imke Gielen, first approached the museum in 2022. The proceeds of the sale will be shared in keeping with the agreement between the museum and the heirs, he says.
The museum plans to exhibit the work in a special display, running from 29 August to 20 October, focussed on Nazi-era provenance and its decision to relinquish the portrait, according to a press release.
Christie’s said the painting will be included in its January Old Masters sale in New York. The price estimate is still under discussion: while the Allentown Art Museum had catalogued the painting as a work by Lucas Cranach the Elder, new research by Christie’s “is leading us in the direction of an attribution to Lucas Cranach the Elder and workshop”, says Marc Porter, the chairman of Christie’s Americas.
The top price for a work catalogued as Cranach and workshop, set in June 2009 at Galerie Fischer Auktionen in Lucerne, was SFr1.2m ($1.1m). A Cranach portrait of John Frederick I, the Elector of Saxony, sold for $7.7m at Christie’s in New York in 2018, the auction record for a single portrait by the artist.