Works by Hans Holbein the Younger
176 works · 167 msHans Holbein the Younger drew each sitter first and then painted down to the last stitch and fastening, and many famous faces of his time, Erasmus and Thomas More among them, are still pictured through his eyes.
Holbein, son of the painter Hans Holbein the Elder, had moved to Basel by 1515 and found work there designing woodcuts for printers. His Dance of Death turns the old Danse Macabre into a reformist satire in which nobody escapes the skeleton, not even the pious. In The Nobleman the man swings a sword at Death, who has him by the coat, while an hourglass waits on a stone slab. Prints and book illustrations make up about half of what follows, and skulls turn up often.
Portraits of Erasmus made Holbein's name abroad, and in 1526 he took Erasmus's recommendation to Thomas More in England; he returned there in 1532 and was Henry VIII's painter by the mid-1530s. Until the later 1530s he often gave sitters a setting, sometimes with props hinting at their private lives. The Steelyard merchant Georg Gisze is shown in 1532 among scales, letters pinned to the wall, coins and a glass vase of carnations, and in The Ambassadors a skull lies stretched out of shape across the floor.
Later he largely dropped props and settings to concentrate on face and clothes. After a three-hour sitting for a drawing in 1538, he painted Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan full-length in black against a plain teal ground. The Betrothal portrait of Anne of Cleves poses her square-on in red and gold, and a tradition holds that it flattered the bride Henry was dismayed to meet.
Sources: Wikipedia, Gemäldegalerie Berlin, National Gallery, Louvre, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
