Augsburg precision that taught England to see itself
Hans Holbein the Younger, born about 1497 and dead between 7 October and 29 November 1543, carried Northern Renaissance exactness from Basel print shops to Henry VIII's court. Through his likenesses we still meet Erasmus and Thomas More; he founded no school, yet left unmatched portraits.
Holbein arrived in the world in Augsburg, then a free imperial city, in the winter of 1497 to 1498, son of the painter Hans Holbein the Elder, who ran a large workshop there. He and his older brother Ambrosius followed the family trade, and all three appear in the father's 1504 triptych of the Basilica of St. Paul. By 1515 the brothers had moved to Basel, a hub of printing and scholarship, where they trained under the leading local painter Hans Herbster and designed woodcuts. That year the preacher Oswald Myconius had them sketch in the margins of a copy of Erasmus's Praise of Folly.
A spell in Lucerne from 1517 painting murals for the merchant Jakob von Hertenstein produced a colourful footnote: on 10 December he was fined five livres for a street brawl with a goldsmith named Caspar. Back in Basel in 1519, he joined the painters' guild, became a citizen and married Elsbeth Binsenstock-Schmid, a widow running a tannery. He painted murals for the House of the Dance and the town hall council chamber, and for the printer Johann Froben designed the Dance of Death woodcuts, the title page of Luther's Bible and twelve ornamented alphabets.
In 1523 he painted Erasmus for the first time, and in 1526 the scholar's recommendation carried him to England, where Thomas More took him in, praised him in a letter as a wonderful artist and found him commissions, including the More family group. He went home in 1528 to keep his citizenship and bought a house, but Basel had turned iconoclast; Erasmus himself left in April 1529, and some of Holbein's church paintings were probably destroyed.
He returned to England in 1532 under Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell and was King's Painter to Henry VIII by 1535, designing jewellery and plate as well as portraits. The poet Nicholas Bourbon called him the Apelles of the age, yet he left no school behind him. He died in 1543, sometime between early October and late November.
Source: Hans Holbein the Younger
