German painter (b. 1497, Augsburg, d. 1543, London). Hans Holbein the Younger, born in Augsburg, was the son of a painter, Hans Holbein the Elder, and received his first artistic training from his father. Hans the Younger may have had early contacts with the Augsburg painter Hans Burgkmair the Elder. In 1515 Hans the Younger and his older brother, Ambrosius, went to Basel, where they were apprenticed to the Swiss painter Hans Herbster. Hans the Younger worked in Lucerne in 1517 and visited northern Italy in 1518-1519. On Sept. 25, 1519, Holbein was enrolled in the painters' guild of Basel, and the following year he set up his own workshop, became a citizen of Basel, and married the widow Elsbeth Schmid, who bore him four children. He painted altarpieces, portraits, and murals and made designs for woodcuts, stained glass, and jewelry. Among his patrons was Erasmus of Rotterdam, who had settled in Basel in 1521. In 1524 Holbein visited France. Holbein gave up his workshop in Basel in 1526 and went to England, armed with a letter of introduction from Erasmus to Sir Thomas More, who received him warmly. Holbein quickly achieved fame and financial success. In 1528 he returned to Basel, where he bought property and received commissions from the city council, Basel publishers, Erasmus, and others. However, with iconoclastic riots instigated by fanatic Protestants, Basel hardly offered the professional security that Holbein desired. In 1532 Holbein returned to England and settled permanently in London, although he left his family in Basel, retained his Basel citizenship, and visited Basel in 1538. He was patronized especially by country gentlemen from Norfolk, German merchants from the Steel Yard in London, and King Henry VIII and his court. Holbein died in London between Oct. 7 and Nov. 29, 1543. With few exceptions, Holbein's work falls naturally into the four periods corresponding to his alternate residences in Basel and London. His earliest extant work is a tabletop with trompe l'oeil motifs (1515) painted for the Swiss standard-bearer Hans Baer. Other notable works of the first Basel period are a diptych of Burgomaster Jakob Meyer zum Hasen and his wife, Dorothea Kannengiesser (1516); a portrait of Bonifacius Amerbach (1519); an unsparingly realistic Dead Christ (1521); a Madonna and Child Enthroned with Two Saints (1522); several portraits of Erasmus, of which the one in Paris (1523 or shortly after), with its accurate observation of the scholar's concentrated attitude and frail person and its beautifully balanced composition, is particularly outstanding; and woodcuts, among which the series of the Dance of Death (ca. 1521-1525, though not published until 1538) represents one of the high points of the artist's graphic oeuvre. Probably about 1520 Holbein painted an altarpiece, the Last Supper, now somewhat cut down, which is based on Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting, and four panels with eight scenes of the Passion of Christ (possibly the shutters of the Last Supper altarpiece), which contain further reminiscences of Italian painting, particularly Andrea Mantegna, the Lombard school, and Raphael, but with lighting effects that are characteristically northern. His two portraits of Magdalena Offenburg, as Laïs of Corinth and Venus with Cupid (1526),   Related Paintings of HOLBEIN, Hans the Younger :. | Darmstadt Madonna sg | The Poet Henry Howard | Portrait of a Member of the Wedigh Family | Portrait of William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury f | Portrait of Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey s |
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Augustus Earle
Australian Painter , 1793-1838 Nephew of Ralph Earl. He exhibited at the Royal Academy in London between 1806 and 1815, when he began travelling. He visited the Mediterranean between 1815 and 1817, and lived in North America (1818-20) and South America (1820-24). In February 1824, en route to India, he was accidentally abandoned on Tristan da Cunha for eight months. The passing ship that rescued him took him to Australia. Here he lived from 1825 until 1828, a period broken by a seven-month residence in New Zealand. During all of his voyages he made watercolour sketches, particularly of places 'hitherto unvisited by any artist', apparently with the intention of publishing a series of aquatints. These drawings, such as a Bivouac, Daybreak, on the Illawarra Mountains (1827; Canberra, N. Lib.), have a robust autobiographical quality. In Sydney he obtained a number of commissions, including a full-length portrait of Governor Sir Thomas Brisbane (1825-6; Sydney, Govt House). Earle returned to England in 1829 and produced a series of prints, Views in New South Wales, and Van Diemen's Land.
Willem Pieterszoon Buytewech
(1591/1592, Rotterdam - September 23, 1624, Rotterdam) was a Dutch painter, draughtsman and etcher of the Golden Age. He is often considered the "inventor" of Dutch genre painting. For his preference of irony, his contemporaries named him Gheestige Willem (Jolly or spiritual William). Buytewech was the son of Pieter Jacobsz, a cobbler and candlemaker. He learned his trade in Haarlem, where he became a member of the artists' guild (Haarlem Guild of St. Luke) in 1612, together with Hercules Segers and Esaias van de Velde.[1] Frans Hals, who was a member of this guild since 1610, had much influence on Buytenwech's work, as shown by the many drawings that the latter made after Hals's paintings. After his marriage on November 10, 1613 with Aeltje van Amerongen, of a patrician family, he returned to Rotterdam. There Hendrik Martenszoon Sorgh was one of his pupils. Buytewech was primarily a graphic artist, mostly of landscapes and genre pieces, but occasionally also of biblical and allegorical themes. Of his paintings only eight have survived to this date, all genre pieces, most depicting merry companies. Willem Buytewech's Merry CompanyHe died at the age of only 32 or 33 of unrecorded causes. His son Willem Willemsz Buytewech (1625-1670), born after his death, would become a painter as well.
BLEKER, Gerrit Claesz
Dutch painter (active 1625-1656 in Haarlem)