Artist Dossier: Lucas Cranach the Elder

Courtesy National Gallery of Art

Lucas Cranach the Elder may not have been as skilled as such contemporaries as Albrecht Durer or Matthias Grunewald, but his works, including this "Portrait of a Princess of Saxony," circa 1512, have a particular appeal.

From the Files

+ The artist's auction record stands at £4.8 million ($8.6 million)—also the highest auction price for any German painting— set at Christie's London in 1990 by a rare 1509 portrait diptych depicting Johann the Steadfast and his six-year-old son, Johann Friedrich the Magnanimous.

+ The prosperous painter-printer ran an apothecary shop that had a monopoly on the sale of medicines, dabbled in real estate and maintained exclusive rights to Bible production in Wittenberg.

+ In 1509, Friedrich the Wise conferred on Cranach a coat of arms featuring a snake with bat wings and a jeweled ring in its jaw; from then on the artist used the snake as a signature in all his works.

+ After the Getty purchased the oil-on-paper study Man in a Red Cap at Sotheby's London in 1991 for £187,000 ($267,000), the museum restored the work and removed 17th-century additions of a hat and shirt.

Pablo Picasso Albrecht Durer John Currin Albrecht Altdorfer Hans Baldung Grien Hans Cranach Lucas Cranach the Elder Lucas Cranach the Younger

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Collectors in this field will find, however, that paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder are still surprisingly available. And while Cranach may not be as skilled as his contemporaries Durer or Grunewald, his works are more beguiling. Indeed, an exhibition last summer at the Courtauld Institute, in London, that focused on a notable Cranach in its collection, Adam and Eve in Paradise, 1526, was a surprise hit.

Specialists at Christie’s and Sotheby’s note that at least two or three Cranachs are offered every season in New York or London. In April 2006, for instance, the unusually detailed Saint Barbara in a Wooded Landscape, circa 1515–18, which had been off the market since the late 1920s, sold at Christie’s New York for a remarkable $4.9 million (est. $1.5–2.5 million). Examples also change hands in private sales: In 2004, the Kimbell, in Fort Worth, purchased the artist’s Judgment of Paris, circa 1512–14, which had fetched £1.2 million ($3.3 million) in 1996 at Sotheby’s London; and in 2003 the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, bought A Faun and His Family with a Slain Lion, a panel painting from circa 1526.

Woodcut prints are rare to the market, especially early ones, but when examples do come up, they are priced in the five figures (the auction record for such works is $40,000). “Most collectors of German prints are only interested in Durer,” says Armand Kunz of C. G. Boerner gallery in New York. “So Cranach prints remain a surprising bargain, despite their rarity.”  

Cranach’s beginnings are somewhat mysterious. His family name is believed to be Sunder, but he adopted a new surname from his hometown of Kronach, in lower Franconia, where he was born in 1472. There is no record of his activities for the first decades of his life, but by 1501, he was residing in Vienna. Just a handful of works survive from the few years he spent there, all of which are in museums. With their saturated colors, monumental figures and florid backgrounds, these dramatic compositions exhibit a desire to dazzle absent from his later output. They include several biblical subjects, notably a Crucifixion and Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, both in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and Rest on the Flight into Egypt, in the Gemaldegalerie, Berlin.

In 1505, Cranach was appointed court painter to Friedrich the Wise, elector of Saxony, and he relocated to Wittenberg, which Friedrich was intent on developing into an intellectual center. The artist proved himself a devoted and industrious servant to the court, heading a large workshop of students and assistants (including his sons, Hans and Lucas the Younger, who would become a major talent in his own right) and producing altarpieces, portraits and engravings in addition to decorating furniture for hunting lodges and ducal residences. He became a close friend of Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon and was instrumental in disseminating their reformist views via propagandistic paintings, prints and tracts. The Cranach workshop produced “celebrity” portraits of Luther by the dozens for an eager clientele; typical of these is Martin Luther and His Wife, Katherina von Bora, a small pair of panels that sold for £608,750 ($875,899) at Christie’s London in 2001. Despite his connections with the powers behind the Reformation, Cranach accepted devotional commissions from Luther’s archenemy, Cardinal Albert of Brandenburg.

As Cranach became more successful, his work grew more polished and standardized and thus easier for assistants to produce. Cranach scholars try “to differentiate the hands of Lucas the Elder, Lucas the Younger and various workshop assistants,” says Nicholas Hall, of Christie’s New York, but “many collectors are not as fastidious. They want a recognizable Cranach and are not overly concerned over how many hands produced it.”