German 1497-1543 Hans Holbein Galleries Holbein always made highly detailed pencil drawings of his portrait subjects, often supplemented with ink and colored chalk. The drawings emphasize facial detail and usually did not include the hands; clothing was only indicated schematically. The outlines of these drawings were then transferred onto the support for the final painting using tiny holes in the paper through which powdered charcoal was transmitted; in later years Holbein used a kind of carbon paper. The final paintings thus had the same scale as the original drawings. Although the drawings were made as studies for paintings, they stand on their own as independent, finely wrought works of art. How many portraits have been lost can be seen from Holbein's book (nearly all pages in the Royal Collection) containing preparatory drawings for portraits - of eighty-five drawings, only a handful have surviving Holbein paintings, though often copies have survived. David Hockney has speculated in the Hockney-Falco thesis that Holbein used a concave mirror to project an image of the subject onto the drawing surface. The image was then traced. However this thesis has not met with general acceptance from art historians. A subtle ability to render character may be noted in Holbein's work, as can be seen in his portraits of Thomas Cromwell, Desiderius Erasmus, and Henry VIII. The end results are convincing as definitive images of the subjects' appearance and personality.  Related Paintings of Hans Holbein :. | Christian arrest | Portrait of Edward VI as a Child | Portrait of Fane Seymour,Queen of England | The Artist Family | Portrait of a Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling |
Related Artists:
John Cecil Clay
Illustrator and genre, caricature painter American 1875-1930 American illustrator known for genre and caricature paintings. Clay was born in Ronceverte, West Virginia to an long-time Southern family. He was a student of Henry Siddons Mowbray at the Art Students League of New York and had a graphic style that was suited to illustration. A reoccurring subject was pretty young women. During his life he worked for Life and Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly. He was a member of Society of Illustrators and was represented at the St. Louis Exposition-World's Fair 1904. Apart from the above mentioned magazines he also worked as an illustrator for The Century Magazine, Saturday Evening Post and Good Housekeeping.
Wolfgang Heimbach
c.1600/1615-after 1678, German painter. The son of a bookkeeper at the corn exchange, he was known because of a disability as 'the Ovelg?nne mute'. An aristocratic sponsor, probably Graf Anton G?nther (1603-67) of Oldenburg, sent him to train in the Netherlands: stylistic considerations would suggest that this was in the 1630s. The Evening Scene (1637; ex-art market, Berlin; G?ttsche, no. 8) shows him adapting the style of Caravaggio as practised in Utrecht to the kind of social gathering depicted by Dirck Hals or Anthonie Palamedesz. He uses an artificial light source to exaggerate the modelling of the figures and the space. This characteristic of his art also shows in the Evening Banquet of 1640
Bartolome Carducho
Italian, 1554-1608