The painting, considered fake, attributed to Lucas Cranach the Elder

LONDON. For more than 100 years, art historians have called the painting bought by Queen Victoria as a Christmas present to Prince Albert a 19th-century fake. But a new generation of art historians discovered that they were wrong. But Victoria and her advisers were not mistaken when they decided to purchase a painting in 1840. Now it is believed that this is the genuine work of the German master Lucas Cranach the Elder and his workshop.

On Tuesday, a beautifully restored work was put on public display at Windsor Castle, taking its place in the Royal Dressing Room along with other works by Cranach.

Nicola Christie, director of painting conservation at the Royal Collection Trust, welcomed the discovery. “This is a thrilling event. This does not happen very often and I am very pleased to know that the attribution error has been fixed. ”

The painting “Portrait of a Lady and Her Son” (written approximately in 1510-1540) shows the unconfirmed wife of the Prince of the Holy Roman Empire and her son, who stand hand in hand.

Victoria and Albert often gave each other paintings for Christmas and birthdays, and Albert, who showed great interest in early German and Dutch art, was most likely delighted with the real Cranach. “Who wouldn’t be?” Continues Christie. “For Victoria, it was completely natural, and I’m sure when she bought it, she considered it a picture of Cranach.”

At some point in the beginning of the 20th century, doubts about the origin of ploltn were abandoned and authorship was again assigned to Franz Wolfgang Roerich, an artist of the beginning of the 19th century, imitator of Cranach.

“It’s known that something about 40 versions of this composition was produced by him,” says Christie. Rohrich sold them as original works and they can still be found in collections around the world, as well as in auction rooms. At Christie’s in 2014, one of these portraits was sold for 25,000 pounds, despite the fact that the genuine picture of Cranach the Elder is estimated at 9.3 million pounds.

Historians suggest that Rohrich painted copies of this painting, imitating the style of Cranach, due to the fact that there were no known versions of the original. “Even Rohrich did not copy the lost picture of Cranach - it was the invention of Roerich.”

About a year ago, the leading expert on the work of Cranach, Professor Gunnar Heidenreich, who had previously seen the picture and had an idea about it, visited the Royal Collection. An X-ray study using infrared reflectography was carried out, which revealed two convincing evidence that the picture could not be written by Roerich and could be the true work of Cranach and his workshop.

First, characteristic fibers identified as pigeon tendons, often used in the 16th century to counteract natural deformation and wood splitting, were found on the panel surface under paint layers. “It would be impossible for Roerich to prepare his panel in the same way that Cranach and his workshop would do,” says Christie. The second discovery is lead yellow pigment, widely used during the time of Cranach, but not in the 19th century.

A professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Cologne, Heidenreich, is convinced that this is a script that should be attributed to Cranach the Elder and his workshop. He asked for a painting to be shown at an exhibition at the Kunstpalast Museum in Dusseldorf in the spring of 2017, and before that, the painting was cleaned to reveal its true beauty.

Since the painting was considered a copy of the 19th century, it was not previously published.

Cranach the Elder was a court painter of the Saxon monarchs in Wittenberg and is considered one of the most important artists of the German school. He was a special passion of Prince Albert, who acquired 12 paintings by Cranach and his workshop, many as gifts from the Queen.

The “Portrait of the Lady and Her Son,” presumably painted between 1510 and 1540, can now be seen in the royal dressing room at Windsor Castle along with other works by Cranach and his workshop: “Apollon and Diana” (p. 1526), “Lucretia” (1530) and the Court of Paris (p. 1530-35).