Lucas Cranach the Younger

Georg Schäfer, Obbach, by whom sold Cologne, Lempertz,  24 May 1982, lot 23 (as Lucas Cranach the Elder), when acquired by the present owner for DM 230,000.

Basel, Kunstmuseum, Lukas Cranach, 1974, no. 367 (as by Lucas Cranach the Younger);
Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Martin Luther und die Reformation in Deutschland, 1983, no. 349 (as by Lucas Cranach the Elder).

V. Westphal, "Zum Gemälde des Lukas Cranach der Ältere 'Christus segnet die Kinder''', in Die Weltkunst, vol. XLI, 1971, p. 226, reproduced p. 181;
D. Koepplin and T. Falk, Lukas Cranach: Gemälde, Zeichungen, Druckgraph, exhibition catalogue, Basel/Stuttgart 1976, p. 518, no. 367 (as Lucas Cranach the Younger);
G. Seebass, in Martin Luther und die Reformation in Deutschland, exhibition catalogue, Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 1983, pp. 269-70, no. 349 (as Cranach the Elder).

The inscription is taken from the Gospel of Saint Mark, X, verse 14: "Let the children come to me, do not hinder them: for to such belongs the Kingdom of God". The subject, which had hitherto rarely been seen, was to become one of the most popular and enduring images produced by the Cranach workshop during the Reformation. As court painters in Wittemberg, the Cranach family found themselves at the very centre of the Protestant Reformation: their patrons, the Electors of Saxony, were the protectors of Martin Luther and championed his cause. Luther and Lucas Cranach the Elder were close friends and godfathers to each other's children. The importance (and popularity) of this subject lay in its twofold meaning to the northern reformers: that faith was the unique gift of God alone (as opposed to through Church intercession), and equally importantly, in its defense of infant baptism in opposition to the beliefs of the Anabaptists, who were the subject of particularly vigorous persecution in Saxony in the late 1520s (cf. G. Seebass and D. Koepplin, under Exhibited (1983) below, pp. 269 and 358-9, under nos. 349 and 478).

The subject is mentioned three times in the accounts of the Elector John Frederick the Magnanimous (1503-54): for 1539, 1543 and 1550 (C. Schurchardt, Lucas Cranach des Älteren Leben und Werken, Leipzig 1851-71, vol. I, pp. 122, 161, 208). As these dates suggest, most examples of this subject were painted by Cranach only after 1537, and many like the present panel seem to have been painted by Lucas Cranach the Younger or entrusted to the workshop. The present painting is best compared to two versions by Lucas Cranach the Elder: in the Church of St. Wenceslaus, Naumberg (104 by 140 cm.), once said to be dated as early as 1529, and in the Kunsthalle, Hamburg (83.5 by 121 cm.), which is dated 1538 (for which see M.J. Friedländer and J. Rosenberg, The Paintings of Lucas Cranach, London 1978, pp. 112, 141, cat. nos. 217 and 362, both reproduced). In each picture, Cranach portrayed the protagonists at three-quarter length, with the central figure of Christ flanked by groups of young mothers with children, and on the left, the disapproving faces on the onlooking Apostles. This pattern formed the basis for the many repetitions and variants produced in the workshop, in which the poses of the principal figures could be repeated, reversed or just adapted. As Friedländer and Rosenberg remark, many of these pictures should be assigned to the hand of Lucas Cranach the Younger, but the high quality of certain passages in the present work, such as the heads of the Disciples, have more recently led to a suggested re-attribution to Lucas Cranach the Elder himself.