A NOTE ON TWO OF THE PAINTINGS IN THE TEXT

Portrait of a Young Girl, painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder, possibly as early as 1520, was acquired by the Louvre in 1910. Although it is widely believed to be a painting of the daughter of Martin Luther, who was born in 1529, the style of the painting is closer to Cranach’s work in the early 1520s, so the identity of the subject remains in question.*

The Astronomer, painted by Johannes Vermeer c. 1668, became part of the collection of the Baron Alphonse de Rothschild in 1907. At the time of the German invasion, the painting was in the collection of Baron Edouard de Rothschild in France, where it was seized by the ERR. It was taken to the Jeu de Paume, declared to be the property of the Third Reich, and was then transported by train to Germany in a crate marked H13, indicating that it was designated to be part of Hitler’s private collection. On November 13, 1940, Alfred Rosenberg, head of the ERR, wrote a letter to Martin Bormann, Hitler’s financial secretary, announcing the find and mentioning Hitler’s special interest in the painting. The painting was returned to France at the end of the war and was shown in the Exhibition of Masterpieces from French Collections Recovered from Germany, held at the Orangerie in Paris in 1946.

Although many of the other paintings and drawings mentioned in this book do exist, their roles are entirely fictitious. Any correspondence with their actual history during the time period of the novel is accidental and unintentional.

 

 

*Source: Max Friedlander and Jakob Rosenberg, Lucas Cranach (New York: Tabard Press, 1978).

Sources: Hector Feliciano, The Lost Museum (New York: HarperCollins/Basic Books, 1997). Ludwig Goldscheider, Johannes Vermeer, Gemalde Gesamtausgabe (Cologne: Phaidon Verlag, 1958).