Christ on the Cross

When this small panel came up at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris on 29 March 1993, it was sold as the work of Enguerrand Quarton, a painter from northern France who worked in Avignon in the middle of the 15th century. The Louvre used the state's right of pre-emption, which lets a French museum step in as the hammer falls and take the lot at the winning price, and the museum's friends' society, the Société des Amis du Louvre, paid for it.

In the autumn of 1994 the Louvre showed it as its painting of the month, already under a different name. Curators now gave it to Barthélemy d'Eyck, painter to René of Anjou, who was working in Provence in the same decades as Quarton. That is how the museum still lists it, with Quarton kept as the former attribution.

It is only 25 centimetres high, and what survives is a fragment. Christ hangs against a red ground patterned with gold scrolls, above a dark green hill, and the back of the panel is painted with an abstract decorative pattern.