b. 1497, Augsburg, d. 1543, London was a German artist and printmaker who worked in a Northern Renaissance style. He is best known as one of the greatest portraitists of the 16th century.[2] He also produced religious art, satire and Reformation propaganda, and made a significant contribution to the history of book design. He is called "the Younger" to distinguish him from his father, Hans Holbein the Elder, an accomplished painter of the Late Gothic school. Born in Augsburg, Holbein worked mainly in Basel as a young artist. At first he painted murals and religious works and designed for stained glass windows and printed books. He also painted the occasional portrait, making his international mark with portraits of the humanist Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. When the Reformation reached Basel, 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. 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 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, Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell. By 1535, he was King's Painter to King Henry VIII. In this role, he produced not only portraits and festive decorations but designs for jewellery, plate, and other precious objects. His portraits of the royal family and nobles are a vivid record of a brilliant court in the momentous years when Henry was asserting his supremacy over the English church. Holbein's art was prized from early in his career. The French poet and reformer Nicholas Bourbon dubbed him "the Apelles of our time".[3] Holbein has also been described as a great "one-off" of art history, since he founded no school.[4] After his death, some of his work was lost, but much was collected, and by the 19th century, Holbein was recognised among the great portrait masters. Recent exhibitions have also highlighted his versatility.   Related Paintings of Hans holbein the younger :. | Portrait of the Merchant Georg Gisze | Portrait of an unknown man, supposed effigy of Thomas More. | Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam | Portrait des Charles de Solier | Portrait of a Man |
Related Artists:
LANFRANCO, Giovanni
Italian painter (b. 1582, Parma, d. 1647, Roma). Italian painter and draughtsman. A major figure in the development of the Roman Baroque in the 1620s, he painted many altarpieces and some cabinet pictures, but was notable above all for a number of dome frescoes that are indebted to the works of Correggio; most celebrated is the Assumption of the Virgin (1625-7) in the dome of S Andrea della Valle, Rome. He also influenced the development of art in Naples, where, between 1634 and 1646, he executed a series of vast fresco commissions that look forward to the art of Luca Giordano and Francesco Solimena. A vast number of Lanfranco's preparatory drawings survive, the majority of which are now in the Museo e Gallerie Nazionali di Capodimonte, Naples. Broadly speaking they are of two types: small (up to 200*250 mm) compositional sketches, either in brown pen, with or without brown wash, on white or beige fine paper, or in red chalk, sometimes with red wash, or, more rarely, in black chalk or a combination of both red and black; and slightly larger
Sally James Farnham
American, 1876-1943
CAVALLINO, Bernardo
Italian Baroque Era Painter, ca.1616-1656 Italian painter and draughtsman. He was the most individual and most poetic painter active in Naples during the first half of the 17th century. He painted mainly small cabinet pictures, on canvas or on copper, for dealers and for highly cultivated private patrons; he had few public commissions and apparently never painted any large-scale decorations for private or ecclesiastical patrons. His subject-matter is largely derived from the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha, Tasso and from Roman history and mythology. Documentary evidence for his life and work is almost non-existent, and he remains enigmatic and elusive as a historical figure. Yet as a painter he is strikingly distinctive, uniting a refinement and virtuosity of brushwork with an intensely naturalistic observation of surfaces, and complex and dramatic compositions with an extraordinary brilliance of palette. Only eight pictures are signed, initialled or inscribed with Cavallino's name. No works are documented and only five may be tentatively identified with pictures in mid-18th-century Neapolitan collections described by Bernardo de Dominici.