Lucas Cranach the Elder, Portrait of a Woman

Attribution and date

The painting has generally been accepted as the work of Cranach himself.²⁵ The quality of this small work is extremely high: the details are executed with great delicacy and precision, and with a deft brushwork characteristic of Cranach’s technique. The depiction of the red velvet, using bright, opaque orange-red paint and translucent dark red applied wet-in-wet over black, corresponds to what Heydenreich has described as Cranach’s ‘inspired approach to the painting of velvet’, celebrated by Johann Neudorffer in 1555.²⁶ The painting is close in style to a number of other half-length depictions by Cranach of women wearing comparable dress and with similar but variant poses, which have usually been dated to the mid-1520s, as well as to Three Female Heads in Truro, a pattern used in subject compositions of this period (fig. 5).²⁷ The subject in a small full-length painting of a woman holding a flower in Warsaw dated 1526 wears comparable dress, though her hairstyle and hat differ.²⁸ The Saint Helena in Cincinnati is dated 1525, and the saint again wears very similar dress and headdress (fig. 2).²⁹ The small roundel of a woman at Stuttgart (fig. 3) is, as already discussed, very close in style and composition to this work and is dated 1527 (apparently changed from 1525).³⁰ Another small full-length of a woman holding an apple in Prague dated 1527 is also similar in style, dress and facial type.³¹ The National Gallery painting is therefore likely to date from the period 1525–7.

fig. 5 Lucas Cranach the Elder, ‘Study for Three Heads’, paper on panel © Truro Museum

fig. 2 Lucas Cranach the Elder, ‘St Helena with the Cross’, 1525, Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio, 1927.387 © Photo Bridgeman Art Library, London

fig. 3 Lucas Cranach the Elder, ‘A Small Roundel of a Woman’, 1525–7, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart on loan from the Eberhard-Karls-Universität, Tübingen, L 796 © akg-images