Portrait of Ernst the Confessor, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg-Celle (1497-1546), half-length

A champion of the Protestant Reformation, Duke Ernst the Confessor of Brunswick-Lüneburg apparently sat to Cranach on several occasions. The first instance appears to have been for a detailed portrait sketch, now in Reims (Musée des Beaux-Arts), which was retained in the workshop of the master and used in the creation of painted portraits, like that in the Stiftung Luthergedenkstätten in Sachsen-Anhalt. The present portrait, however, appears to have been copied from a different, now lost, prototype by the Cranach which relied on a different model. Showing the duke dressed in more elaborate embroidered, fur-lined overgown and a black doublet with slashed sleeves, this lost picture was copied in a small watercolor on vellum in circa 1595 (London, Royal Collection, inv. no. RCIN 420435), and in a drawing in the Lüneburger Bilderchronik, dated to that same year, both of which show the sitter in an identical pose to the present, down to the positioning of the hands and fingers. According to labels on the reverse, this portrait was part of the collection of the Royal House of Hanover and recorded at Schloss Marienburg in 1906 or 1907 (inv. no. 63) and then at Schloss Blankenburg (no. 0062) by circa 1929. It is possible that the painting may have descended through the sitter’s family to the Hanoverian house.