Hans Holbein 14971543 son is a great artist

Hans Holbein (1497-1543) son is a great artist. He had the gift, as few painters to give life to his characters. The faces of men and women he represents literally out of the canvas. The portraits are often brushed on a blue background deep contrasts with the dark of their holding. Complete control over the colors, the virtuosity in rendering expressions... Holbein is regarded as one of the great masters of the North in the early 16th century.

An exhibition of his works is always an event. The Basel Kunstmuseum exposes forty paintings and hundreds of drawings of the artist, produced in the period where he resided mainly in Basel, for seventeen years from 1515 until 2 July. The second episode of the exhibition on the life and work of Holbein the younger will be held at the Tate Britain in London on September 28.

The idea is interesting but its a little disappointing application. Indeed the Basel Museum owns the largest collection known of Holbein works and also refuses to lend them. For those who do not know this beautiful permanent collection, the exhibition presents a certain interest. For others, it does not add much, the most beautiful paintings and drawings clearly belonging to the Swiss institution.

Art of the portrait

Hans Holbein is the son of a successful painter of Augsburg itself called Hans Holbein. Basel is a key place in the production of books and it is certainly to illustrate works it was there while he was about seventeen years. Very soon he made a name in the art of the portrait and a year after his arrival in 1516, he already running from the Mayor of the city Jacob Meyer and his wife. Style is still inspired by his father, but without the clumsiness of youth. The blue of the background is already present, with an architectural framework that reflects Venetian influence mediated by the engravings of the time. The characters represented, each on a canvas so that they can to face, have a strong presence. His precocity of painter does not, preclude as good artists of his time, to continue to produce illustrations and engravings that provide its renown beyond Basel.

However, the masterpiece of this period, one that gives chills to visitors to the permanent collection is not a portrait. It is a painting of format rectangular, two-metre-long and barely thirty centimeters high which is the body of Christ. A large morbid Sham which could be inspired by the altarpiece painted in 1515 by Mathias Grunwald, another giant of the painting of the time including the monumental work was exposed a few kilometres from Basel (today the centrepiece of the old paint is visible at the Museum Unterlinden in Colmar). Dramatic coaching takes the form of a casket there would be a cut of profile. Purple stigmas are highlighted on the greenish and wasted body. The effect is all the more striking that the representation is actual size.

The other masterpiece of Holbein the Basel is the "Portrait of the wife of the painter and his two elder children", executed in 1528. The painter expressed a realism combining the personality of its models. The Lady is shown with his large nose and sad eyes that make many mysterious. Pass in the Protestant city in the 19th century, novelist Huysmans commented on looking at the table. "With red eyes, a sorry air and two children, it takes you by his expression of life.".