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 Fane Seymour,Queen of England | Portrait of Henry VIII | Cardinal Albrecht of Branden-burg before the Crucifiel Christ | Christina of Denmark | Erasmus portrait |
Related Artists:
Hogers, Jacob
Flemish Baroque Era, 17th Century
Gerrit Willem Dijsselhof
painted Autumn Day in 1895
SEGHERS, Gerard
Flemish Baroque Era Painter, 1591-1651 Flemish painter, dealer and collector, active also in Italy and Spain. He grew up in Antwerp, a city that had only recently been liberated from the rebels by the Spanish troops. His father, a keeper of a wine tavern, originally had Calvinist sympathies but returned to the Catholic faith after 1585. Gerard possibly trained, as did afterwards his younger brother Jan Baptist Seghers, who later became a goldsmith, with Gaspar de Crayer (b 1551), the father of the well-known painter of the same name. At the age of 12 Seghers was listed as a pupil in the Guild of St Luke in Antwerp; the documents, unfortunately, fail to mention the name of his teacher. Florent Le Comte (1699) called him a pupil of Abraham Janssen