Portrait of J.S. Bach goes 'home' to Leipzig's Bach Archive

"Bach is Coming Home!" For once a press release gets it pretty well bang-on: the single greatest image of Bach in existence (and there are only two - possibly three) is to return to its rightful place in the Bach Archive in Leipzig, taking pride of place in the German city in which Bach spent his most important years.

The portrait of the composer, aged about 60, by Elias Gottlob Haussmann, has been in the private collection of American philanthropist William H. Scheide for more than 60 years - it hung in his living room - but, on his death last year, he bequeathed it to the Bach Archive.

Almost as fascinating as the painting's subject is its own history. It is one of two portraits of the composer painted by Haussmann. The first, badly damaged partly due to poor restorations, is still in Leipzig, in the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum; this 1748 image was part of Bach's second-eldest son Carl Philipp Emanuel's inheritance.

A 1790 catalogue of the estate of the "Hamburg Bach" shows it still in his family's possession. In the early 19th century the painting was bought in a curiosity shop by the Jenke family from Breslau (now Wroclaw). Several generations later, Walter Jenke fled Germany for England in the 1930s, and, to protect his family's painting from air raids, he kept it at the country home of his friends, the Gardiners, in Dorset.

And it's one of those astonishing flukes of music history that this very image was the painting that arguably the greatest-living Bachian, John Eliot Gardiner, grew up with at his childhood home in Dorset.

After the war, Jenke sold the portrait at auction in 1952, when it was bought by the Bach scholar William Scheide, in whose care it was until April 29, when - in a private ceremony at the Scheide's home - it was officially donated to the Leipzig Bach Archive.