Hans Holbein the Younger Biografie （Hans Holbein Biografie） :

Hans Holbein the Younger (1497—1543) was a famous German artist and printmaker who worked in a Northern Renaissance style. He was best known as one of the greatest portraitists of the 16th century. He also produced religious art works, satire and Reformation propaganda, and made a significant contribution to the history of book design. He was called "the Younger" to distinguish him from his father, Hans Holbein the Elder, an accomplished painter of the Late Gothic school.

Born in Augsburg, Hans Holbein worked mainly in Basel as a young painting artist. At first, he painted murals and religious painting works and designed for stained glass windows and printed books. He also painted the occasional portrait paintings, making his international mark with portraits of the humanist Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. When the Reformation reached Basel, Hans Holbein worked for reformist clients while continuing to serve traditional religious patrons. His Late Gothic style was enriched by artistic trends in Italy, France, and the Netherlands, as well as by Renaissance Humanism. The result was a combined aesthetic uniquely his own.

Hans Holbein travelled to England in 1526 in search of work, with a recommendation from Erasmus. He was welcomed into the humanist circle of Thomas More, where he quickly built quite a high reputation. After returning to Basel for four years, he resumed his career in England in 1532. This time he worked for the twin founts of patronage,

Hans Holbein's painting art was prized from early in his career. The French poet and reformer Nicholas Bourbon defined him as "the Apelles of our time". Hans Holbein has also been described as a great "one-off" of art history, since he founded no school. After his death, some of his painting works were lost, but much were collected, and by the 19th century, Hans Holbein was recognised among the great portrait painting masters. Recent exhibitions have also highlighted his versatility. He turned his fluid line to designs ranging from intricate jewellery to monumental frescoes. Hans Holbein's art has sometimes been called realist, since he drew and painted with a rare precision. His portrait paintings were renowned in their time for their likeness; and it is through Hans Holbein's eyes that many famous figures of his day, such as Erasmus and More, are now "seen". Hans Holbein was never content, however, with outward appearance. He embedded layers of symbolism, allusion, and paradox in his art, to the lasting fascination of scholars. In the view of art historian Ellis terhouse, his portraiture "remains unsurpassed for sureness and economy of statement, penetration into character, and a combined richness and purity of style".

Influences：

Hans Holbein's Lais of Corinth, 1526, reveals the influence of Leonardo. Oil and tempera on limewood, Kunstmuseum Basel.

The first influence on Hans Holbein was his father. Hans Holbein the Elder, an accomplished religious artist and portraitist, passed on his techniques as a religious artist and his gifts as a portraitist to his son. The young Hans Holbein learned his craft in his father's workshop in Augsburg, a city with a thriving book trade, where woodcut and engraving flourished. Augsburg also acted as one of the chief "ports of entry" into Germany for the ideas of the Italian Renaissance. By that time Hans Holbein began his apprenticeship under Hans Herbster in Basel, he was already steeped in the late Gothic style, with its unsparing realism and emphasis on line, which influenced him throughout his life. In Basel, he was favoured by humanist patrons, whose ideas helped form his vision as a mature artist.

During his Swiss years, when he may have visited Italy, Hans Holbein added an Italian element to his stylistic vocabulary. Scholars note the influence of Leonardo da Vinci's "sfumato" (smoky) painting technique on his works, for example in his Venus and Amor and Lais of Corinth. From the Italians, Hans Holbein learned the art of single-point perspective and the use of antique motifs and architectural forms. In this, he may have been influenced by Andrea Mantegna. The decorative detail recedes in his late portrait paintings, though the calculated precision remains. Despite assimilating Italian techniques and Reformation theology, Holbein's art in many ways extended the Gothic tradition. His portrait painting style, for example, remained distinct from the more sensuous technique of Titian, and from the Mannerism of William Scrots, Hans Holbein's successor as King's Painter. Hans Holbein's portraiture, particularly his paintings, had more in common with that of Jean Clouet, which he may have seen during his visit to France in 1524. He adopted Clouet's method of painting with coloured chalks on a plain ground, as well as his care over preliminary portrait paintings for their own sake. During his second stay in England, Holbein learned the technique of limning, as practised by Lucas Horenbout. In his last years, he raised the art of the portrait miniature to its first peak of brilliance.

Legacy and reputation:

Study for the Family Portrait painting of Thomas More, c. 1527. Pen and brush in black on chalk sketch, Kunstmuseum Basel.

Hans Holbein's fame owes something to that of his sitters. Several of his portrait paintings have become cultural icons. He created the standard image of Henry VIII. In painting Henry as an

In Basel, Hans Holbein's legacy was secured by his friend Amerbach and by Amerbach's son Basilius, who collected his work. The Amerbach-Kabinett later formed the core of the Holbein collection at the Kunstmuseum Basel. Although Hans Holbein's art was also valued in England, few 16th-century English documents mention him. Archbishop Matthew Parker (1504–75) observed that his portrait paintings were "dilineated and expressed to the resemblance of life". At the end of the 16th century, the miniature portraitist Nicholas Hilliard spoke in his treatise Arte of Limning of his debt to Holbein: "Hans Holbein's manner have I ever imitated, and hold it for the best". No account of Hans Holbein's life was written until Karel van Mander's often inaccurate "Schilder-Boeck" (Painter-Book) of 1604.  (Hans Holbein the Younger Biografie)

Hans Holbein's followers produced copies and versions of his work, but he does not seem to have founded a school. Biographer Derek Wilson calls him one of the great "one-offs" of art history. The only artist who appeared to have adopted his techniques was John Bettes the Elder, whose Man in a Black Cap (1545) is close in style to Hans Holbein. Scholars differ about Hans Holbein's influence on English art. In Foister's view: "Hans Holbein had no real successors and few imitators in England. The disparity between his subtle, interrogatory portraits of men and women whose gazes follow us, and the stylised portraits of Elizabeth I and her courtiers can seem extreme, the more so as it is difficult to trace a proper stylistic succession to Hans Holbein's work to bridge the middle of the century".[135] Nevertheless, "modern" painting in England may be said to have begun with Holbein. That later artists were aware of his work is evident in their own, sometimes explicitly. Hans Eworth, for example, painted two full-length copies in the 1560s of Holbein's Henry VIII derived from the Whitehall pattern and included a Holbein in the background of his Mary Neville, Lady Dacre. The influence of Hans Holbein's "monumentality and attention to texture" has been detected in Eworths' work. According to art historian Erna Auerbach: "Hans Holbein's influence on the style of English portraiture was undoubtedly immense. Thanks to his excellent genius, a portrait type was created which both served the requirements of the sitter and raised portraiture in England to a European level. It became the prototype of the English Court portrait of the Renaissance period".

The fashion for Old Masters in England after the 1620s created a demand for Hans Holbein, led by the connoisseur Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel. The Flemish artists Anthony van Dyck and Peter Paul Rubens discovered Hans Holbein through ArunHans Holbeinproduced by the Frenchman Charles Patin and the Swiss Sebastian Faesch in 1656. They published it with Erasmus's Encomium moriæ (The Praise of Folly) and an inaccurate biography that portrayed Hans Holbein as dissolute.

In the 18th century, Hans Holbein found favour in Europe with those who saw his precise art as an antidote to the Baroque. In England, the connoisseur and antiquarian Horace Walpole (1717–97) praised him as a master of the Gothic. Walpole hung his neo-Gothic house at Strawberry Hill with copies of Holbeins and kept a Holbein room. From around 1780, a re-evaluation of Hans Holbein set in, and he was enshrined among the canonical masters. A new cult of the sacral art masterpiece arose, endorsed by the German Romantics. This view suffered a setback during the famous controversy known as the "Holbein-Streit" (Holbein dispute) in the 1870s. It emerged that the revered Meyer Madonna at Dresden was a copy, and that the little-known version at Darmstadt was the Holbein original. Since then, scholars have gradually removed the attribution to Hans Holbein from many copies and derivative works. The current scholarly view of Holbein's art stresses his versatility, not only as a painter but as a draughtsman, printmaker, and designer. Art historian Erika Michael believes that "the breadth of his artistic legacy has been a significant factor in the sustained reception of his oeuvre".

Edited by Kevin from Xiamen Romandy Art Limited.
(Xiamen Romandy Art is a professional oil paintings supplier from China. If you want to convert your photos into high quality oil paintings, or you want the masterpiece oil painting reproductions, please don's hesitate to contact with us.)
Romandy Art Website: http://www.oilpaintingcentre.com
Email: romandyart@gmail.com

Refer to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Holbein_the_Younger

Tags: Hans Holbein the Younger Biografie, Hans Holbein Paintings, Hans Holbein Biografie, Hans Holbein Biography.