Portrait of a Man with a Red Beard

The panel is dated 1548, a year after Emperor Charles V defeated the Protestant princes at Mühlberg and Wittenberg, the Cranach family's town, passed to a new Saxon ruler. Who this man was is not known. He wears plain black over a white shirt, hands clasped, and his red hair and long beard stand out against the grey-green ground. The Mauritshuis attributes the portrait to Lucas Cranach the Younger and describes the attribution as probable. Father and son painted in the same fine, standardised manner, and their hands are hard to tell apart. Under the date, in the upper left corner, sits the workshop's mark, a crowned serpent with wings and a ring in its mouth. The panel reached the Rijksmuseum in 1912 as a bequest from the collector Cornelis Hoogendijk, and it has been on loan to the Mauritshuis since 1951.