A Painting With a Nazi Past

London Museum Piece Once Belonged to Hitler

LONDON, March 27 -- A naked goddess, an intrepid war correspondent, Adolf Hitler's inner sanctum and the secret wartime journey of a 500-year-old painting worth millions of dollars.

Art stories don't come much more Indiana Jones than this.

Britain's National Gallery announced Thursday that new research has disclosed that a painting in its collection, "Cupid Complaining to Venus," by the German Renaissance artist Lucas Cranach the Elder, was once part of Hitler's private collection.

"We've never had anything like this before," said museum spokesman Thomas Almeroth-Williams. "It's incredibly rare."

The museum is investigating to determine the exact provenance of the painting, which was painted in about 1525, with particular emphasis on whether it might have been looted from Jewish owners by the Nazis.

So far, Almeroth-Williams said, the museum's experts have been unable to account for the painting's ownership or whereabouts from 1909, when it was sold at auction in Berlin, to 1945, when U.S. soldiers allowed a U.S. war correspondent to remove it from a warehouse of art they were guarding in southern Germany.

A researcher, Birgit Schwartz, who has been studying Hitler's art collecting, spotted the painting in a photograph of Hitler's private gallery contained in an album at the Library of Congress in Washington.

She recently brought it to the attention of the National Gallery, whose experts have concluded that the painting in the photograph is the same one now in the gallery's possession, Almeroth-Williams said.

While such a discovery is startling, art dealers said it is typical of how paintings and other works of art often become as famous for their journeys over centuries as for their brush strokes.

"Whenever I sell a painting, I always tell people, 'It's not just a painting, it's a little piece of history,' " said Peter Nahum, a London art dealer. "It takes you to another world -- and this one has already taken you into Hitler's private collection."

The painting, an oil-on-wood work measuring 33.2 by 22 inches, shows Cupid complaining to a naked Venus that he has been stung by bees after stealing honey from their hive. According to the gallery, the painting's message is that "life's brief pleasure is mixed with pain."

The National Gallery bought the painting in 1963 from New York art dealers E & A Silbermann, who told the gallery that they had purchased it from "family descendants" of the buyer at the 1909 Berlin auction.