Bonhams is to sell Lucas Cranach the Younger’s portraits of Prince Joachim Ernst von Anhalt and his first wife, Princess Agnes Gräfin von Barby at its Old Master Pictures sale in London on 3 December. The portraits are being sold as one lot, estimated at £80,000-120,000.
Joachim Ernst von Anhalt was born in 1536 in Dessau, in what is now the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. After an extensive education under the supervision of his father he was admitted to the University of Wittenberg at the age of just thirteen. The deaths successively of his father, uncle and brothers led to Joachim’s emergence in 1570 as the sole ruler of the Anhalt estates, the first time this had happened since their partition in 1252.
