The Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Paul

For more than half a century this picture formed a part of the celebrated Leuchtenberg collection, largely assembled by Eugène de Beauharnais, 1st Duke of Leuchtenberg, the son of Joséphine Bonaparte, Empress of the French by virtue of her marriage to Napoléon Bonaparte. Eugène was the son of Alexandre, vicomte de Beauharnais, a general and political figure who died under the guillotine during the reign of terror. Adopted by Napoléon, Eugène served as a commander in the Imperial army and proved to be the most capable of the Emperor's relatives in official posts. His second son, Maximilian, 3rd Duke, married Grand Duchess Maria, daughter of Emperor Nicholas I of Russia (and niece of Napoléon's opponent, Alexander I of Russia). Granted the style of His Imperial Highness by Nicholas in view of his Imperial descent, Maximilian was portrayed in one of Karl Briullov's most dashing half-length portraits (1849), and is thought to have moved the collection from Munich to Saint Petersburg, where his descendants settled as members of the highest circles of Russian nobility. By 1855 the picture had been transferred from panel onto canvas (a measure routinely undertaken by Russian conservators as a safeguard against the effects of the climate, and often practiced with great success) by Fedor Tabuntsov (?-1861), the chief technical restorer at the Hermitage and, as the pupil of Andrei F. Mitrohin and the teacher of the Sidorovs, a member of the founding dynasty of the Russian school of restoration (see M. van de Laar, O. Karuvits et al., 'From Wood to Canvas', Rijksmuseum Bulletin, 2010, no. 3, p. 223; we are grateful to Simon Bobak for the reference). By 1917 at least 93 paintings from the Leuchtenberg collection, including the present work then attributed to Titian, had been sold to Nordiska Kompaniet, a department store founded in Stockholm in 1902.