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 :. | Portrait of Henry VIII, | Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam writing | Portrait of a young mercant | Darmstadt Madonna, | Erasmus (mk05) |
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Pier Leone Ghezzi
(Rome, 28 June 1674 - Rome, 6 March 1755) was an Italian Rococo painter and caricaturist active in Rome. Caricature of composer Antonio Vivaldi by Pier Leone GhezziGhezzi was born in Rome. His father, Giuseppe Ghezzi, (1634-1721), also trained Antonio Amorosi, and was a secretary to the Roman Accademia di San Luca. Pier Leone himself joined the Academy in 1705 and he executed a painting, the Allegory of Gratitude, to be donated to the institution, as was customary. He was the godson of Carlo Maratta. Pier Leone is known for his frescoes in the Villa Falconieri of Frascati. His pen and gouache caricatures are much freer in emotion than his state portraiture, and often depict named individuals or professions in satirical fashion.
Eyre Crowe
Sir Eyre Alexander Barby Wichart Crowe GCB GCMG (30 July 1864 - 28 April 1925) was a British diplomat. Crowe was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB) in 1907, Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG) in 1911, Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in 1917, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George (GCMG) in the 1920 New Year Honours,[1] and Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (GCB) in the 1923 Birthday Honours. Eyre Crowe was born in Leipzig and educated at Desseldorf and Berlin and in France, with a German mother and a German wife. His father Joseph Archer Crowe had been a British consul-general and ended his career as commercial attache for all of Europe (1882-1896). His grandfather Eyre Evans Crowe was a journalist, writer and historian, and his uncle, Eyre Crowe, was an artist. Crowe first visited England in 1882 when he was seventeen to cram for the Foreign Office examination and at the time was not fully fluent in English.[2] Even later in life it was reported that when angry he spoke English with a German accent. He married his widowed German cousin Clema Gerhardt in 1903. Crowe's wife's uncle was Henning von Holzendorff, who was to become the Chief of the German Naval Staff in the First World War. Due to being half-German, Crowe was often attacked in the press and by Christabel Pankhurst and William le Queux for this during the First World War.
Thomas Frye
The Anglo-Irish painter Thomas Frye (c. 1710 - 3 April 1762 best known for his portraits in oil and pastel, including some miniatures and his early mezzotint engravings, was also the patentee of the Bow porcelain factory, London, and claimed in his epitaph to be "the inventor and first manufacturer of porcelain in England," though his rivals at the Chelsea porcelain factory seem to have preceded him in bringing wares to market. The Bow porcelain works did not long survive Frye's death; their final auctions took place in May 1764. Thomas Frye was born at Edenderry, County Offaly, Ireland, in 1710; in his youth he went to London to practice as an artist. His earliest work are a pair of pastel portraits of boys, one dated 1734 (Earl of Iveagh). For the Worshipful Company of Saddlers he painted a full-length portrait of Frederick, Prince of Wales (1736, destroyed 1940), which he engraved in mezzotint and published in 1741. With his silent partner, a London merchant Edward Heylyn, he took out a patent on kaolin to be imported from the English colony of Virginia in November 1745, and became manager of the Bow factory from its obscure beginnings in the 1740s. He retired to Wales in 1759 for the sake of his lungs, but soon returned to London and resumed his occupation as an engraver, publishing the series of life-size fancy portraits in mezzotint, by which he is most remembered. He died of consumption on 2 April 1762. Frye had five children; his two daughters assisted him in painting porcelain at Bow until their marriages. One of them, who married a Mr. Willcox, was employed by Josiah Wedgwood at the Wedgwood Etruria works in painting figure-subjects from 1759 to 1776, the year of her death.