A specialist in Spanish and Italian art of the 16th and 17th centuries who served as chief curator of the Bavarian State Painting Collection and taught at the University of Munich in the years leading up to World War II, Mayer acquired the soon-to-be-auctioned di Cione work from prominent Berlin dealer Paul Cassirer sometime after 1927.Mayer resigned from his curatorial post in 1931 and eventually fled to France in 1935, despite begin arrested by the Nazis two years earlier. While in Paris, Mayer continued working as an art historian under the pseudonym Henri Antoine, but he still faced Nazi persecution in France and fled Paris for the French countryside several times until his arrest and deportation in 1944.