Old Master Paintings

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Lot 28
  • 28

Lucas Cranach the Younger Wittenberg 1515 - 1586

Estimate
80,000 - 120,000 GBP
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Description

  • Lucas Cranach the Younger
  • Christ blessing the children
  • signed upper right with the artist's device of a winged serpent
    and inscribed along the upper margin: LASSET DIE KINDLIN ZV MIR KOMMEN VND WERET INEN NICHT DAN SOLCHER IST DAS REICHGOTTES./ .MAR.X.
  • oil on panel

Provenance

Acquired by the family of the present owner in Hanover in 1963.

Catalogue Note

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, hitherto rare, was to become one of the most popular and enduring images of the Protestant Reformation. As court painters at Wittenberg, the Cranach family were at the very centre of the Reformation. Martin Luther and Lucas Cranach were close friends and godfathers to each other's children, and Cranach's patrons, the Electors of Saxony were the protectors of Luther and championed his cause. The importance (and popularity) of the subject lay in its twofold meaning to the northern reformers: that faith was the unique gift of God alone (as opposed to church intercession) and 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.

This subject is mentioned three times in the accounts of the Elector John Frederick the Magnanimous (1503-54); for 1539, 1543 and 1550.1 As these dates suggest, most examples of this subject were therefore painted after 1537, and many like the present panel seem  to have been painted by Lucas Cranach the Younger or entrusted to the workshop. Virtually all employ the same compositional format of depicting the protagonists at three-quarter length, with the central figure of Christ flanked by groups of young mothers and children on the right, and the disapproving Apostles to the left. The present design may be most closely compared to a smaller (35 by 48 cm.) panel in the collection of the University of Saint Thomas, Houston, Texas, which M.J. Friedländer and J. Rosenberg (see Literature) date to around 1540.2

1. C, Schurchart, Lucas Cranach des Älteren Leben und Werken, Leipzig 1851-71, vol. I, pp. 122, 161, 208.
2. M.J. Friedländer and J. Rosenberg, The Paintings of Lucas Cranach, London 1978, p. 141, no. 363, reproduced).