Portrait of a Woman

In December 1911 the Museum of Fine Arts paid 20,000 dollars to a New York gallery for this panel and entered it in its register as a work by Lucas Cranach the Elder, the famous court painter of Wittenberg. It had come from Adolf Thiem, a German collector who had taken his pictures with him to San Remo on the Italian Riviera. The sitter's name did not come with it, and it is still unknown. She is a woman of middle years or older, in a black gown, her head and chin wrapped in white linen in the way married women of standing dressed in Saxony at the time. She holds a handkerchief in her folded hands, and there are rings on her fingers. At the right, beside her face, the workshop painted its mark, a small winged serpent, with the year 1549 below it. In that year the elder Cranach was in his late seventies and his son, Lucas the Younger, in his early thirties, and both were working in the family shop. In 2013 the museum moved the panel from the father to the son.