Lamentation over the Dead Christ

In 1943 the German occupiers seized this small panel at Chambon, near Tulle in central France, where the heirs of the Paris collector Adolphe Schloss had hidden his pictures. A long dispute between French and German officials followed. To keep the collection in France, the Louvre claimed this panel and 48 other Schloss paintings and entered them in its inventory, on paper only. In 1946 all of them went back to the family, and when the collection was sold in Paris in 1951 the museum bought the Lamentation outright.

It was probably the left wing of a small folding diptych made for private prayer. The right wing, which would have shown the owner kneeling, is lost. The Louvre's catalogue calls the stone niche around the mourners a deliberately old-fashioned choice.