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 Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan, | Madonna of Mercy and the Family of Jakob Meyer zum Hasen | Portrait of the Merchant Georg Gisze | Henry Brandon | Adam and Eve |
Related Artists:
Barend Cornelis Koekkoek
1803-1862 Dutch Barend Cornelis Koekkoek Gallery Koekkoek??s own paintings reveal a careful study and synthesis of Dutch seventeenth century painters. His art is firmly rooted in the great Dutch romantic tradition established by the seventeenth-century masters: Hobbema, Cuyp, Ruisdael and Wynants. The golden light and the inclusion of travellers in his work suggests Koekkoek also admired the Dutch Italianate painters of the seventeenth century, collectively known as the Bamboccianti, especially Pieter van Laer and Jan Both. Koekkoek imagined his pictures as the result of an ideal combination of observation and artifice. He studied art and nature with equal acuity, creating beautiful landscape paintings that celebrated the greatness of Creation. ??Koekkoek's work impresses the spectator by its power, by the firm and correct construction of the trees, by the broad, natural growth of the leaves and boughs, [and] by the careful and elaborate reproduction of the wooded landscape?? (G. H. Marius, Dutch Painters of the Nineteenth Century, Woodbridge, 1973, p. 89). Up to this day, Willem Koekkoek's work is very much favoured for the lively composition and the mood of nostalgia, in which the Dutch Golden Age seems to linger on. Just as he was during his own lifetime, Koekkoek is widely regarded as the most accomplished landscape painter of Dutch romanticism, against whose scrupulously refined paintings the work his contemporaries is measured.
James Archer
1823-1904 British James Archer (1823-1904) was a portrait-painter. He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. His best-known work includes children and people in costume as its subjects becoming the first Victorian painter to do children's portraits in period costume. He studied at the Trustee's Academy in Edinburgh under Sir William Allan. At Archer painted chalk portraits, but in 1849 he exhibited his first historical picture 'The Last Supper' at the Royal Scottish Academy. His work after that mostly consisted of scenes taken from literature or legends that were popular at the time, such as Shakespeare and King Arthur. In about 1859 he began to paint a series of Arthurian subjects, including 'La Morte d'Arthur' and 'Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere'. James Archer died in 1904 in Haslemere in Surrey, England, survived by his son and three daughters from his marriage to Jane Clerk.
PULIGO, Domenico
Italian Painter, 1492-1527 He trained in Florence with Ridolfo Ghirlandaio and in the workshops of Antonio del Ceraiuolo ( fl 1st half 16th century) and Andrea del Sarto. What may be his earliest surviving work, the Virgin and Child with St John (c. 1513; Rome, Pal. Venezia), reflects the style of Ghirlandaio. Other early paintings, however, such as the Holy Family (Florence, Gal. Corsini), show the influence of Fra Bartolommeo and Andrea del Sarto and are little affected by Ghirlandaio. The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John (c. 1522; Florence, Pitti) clearly reflects the examples of Fra Bartolommeo and Raphael, with the figures in the manner of Andrea del Sarto. The figure of the Christ Child may derive from Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks (c. 1507-8; Alnwick Castle, Northumb., on loan to London, N.G.). Over a dozen drawings have been attributed to Puligo, but none relates to his extant work or resembles his style of painting. Vasari described him as a particularly lazy artist, which may account for this scarcity of drawings and for the frequency of borrowed motifs and repeated compositions in his smaller religious paintings. Such borrowing often resulted in a lack of harmony in his compositions, as in the Pitti Virgin and Child. The influence of the more sculptural forms of Andrea del Sarto's work of the 1520s can be seen in the Mary Magdalene (c. 1525; Ottawa, N.G.).