Hans Schaufelein

MET MUSEUM SNAGS NEW OLD MASTER

The European paintings department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art has just acquired a major German Renaissance painting by Hans Schaufelein (ca. 1482-ca. 1589), a pupil of Albrecht Dürer whose works are seldom encountered outside of Germany. A double-sided altarpiece panel of ca. 1510 depicting The Death of the Virgin backed with The Carrying of the Cross, once owned by the great 19th-century British champion of Gothic architecture Augustus Pugin (and subsequently sold at Christie’s London for a mere 10,000 guineas in 1970), it was bought by New York dealer Otto Naumann at Sotheby’s London in July for £2,279,250 ($4,382,084) and re-sold to the Met for an “undisclosed but very reasonable price.” The Met had previously owned only several fine woodcuts and two beautiful drawings by the artist. The picture was briefly on view as an "anonymous loan" in the museum German Renaissance gallery, but is now being cleaned.

The Met’s new masterpiece was desperately needed, as its collections of German 15th- and 16th-century paintings are the weakest in it its European Paintings department. Paintings by Albrecht Altdorfer and Matthias Grunewald, the two German painters the Met would most love to have, are unobtainable, and in fact, any early German pictures of high quality (Lucas Cranachs excepted) rarely come on the market. The last German picture of importance to be purchased by the Met was almost 30 years ago in 1982: Hans Baldung Grien’s beautiful Vision of St. John on Patmos (from former curator-turned-dealer Claus Virch).

On the surface, the Met’s German collection isn’t bad, with two paintings by Albrecht Dürer and eight pictures each by Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Holbein the Younger (not counting lesser “school pictures” and “copies after”) and a solid group of portraits by less familiar masters such as Barthel Beham, Bernhard Strigel, Ulrich Apt the Elder, Barthel Bruyn the Elder (and Younger) and Conrad Faber. The museum’s finest example of German Renaissance portraiture is a unique triptych of Christ Blessing Surrounded by a Donor and His Family by an anonymous Saxon master ca. 1575-80, which despite decades of debate remains tantalizingly anonymous.

Just as the Met’s holdings of 18th- and 19th-century British paintings prove that a well-rounded collection needs more than just portraits, the Met’s German paintings have long been weak in narrative and religious subjects -- with good reason. The most exciting German pictures of the time have long been a little wilder, unkempt and even mildly disturbing for the tastes of most American collectors and museum trustees.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Met paintings curator Roger Fry was unable to convince J.P. Morgan of the importance and beauty of Albrecht Altdorfer’s Christ Taking Leave of His Mother, which he wished to buy (now in the National Gallery, London) -- Morgan thought it “repellent” -- and curator Claus Virch received a similar reaction from the trustees when he hoped to acquire the delectably sinister Eve, the Serpent and Death by Hans Baldung Grien in 1970 -- the picture was instead snapped up by curator Jean Sutherland Boggs for the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

In 1922, the Met’s myopia was temporarily corrected with the $600 purchase of a turbulent 16th-century Swiss panel by Nicholas Manuel Deutsch of The Conversion of St. Paul. Celebrated at the time ofits acquisition as one of the very few pictures by the artist not in a Swiss museum, the picture hung for less than 20 years before it was downgraded to “Anonymous Swiss School” then banished to the storerooms as a fake.

Deaccessioned at Parke-Bernet in 1956, it was bought by Julius Weitzner for $6,250 and is now in the Kunstmuseum Bern, correctly identified as a rare work by. . . Nicolas Manuel Deutsch.

PAUL JEROMACK is a New York critic and journalist.