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HOLBEIN, Hans the Younger
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Henry_VIII_after
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Henry VIII after
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| 1537 Oil on canvas, 233,7 x 134,6 Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool The top job of Holbein, the court painter, was quite certainly to paint the king's portrait. In the 1530s, Henry VIII had enlarged his London residence Whitehall Palace, and needed a grand picture for it. It was to feature not only him and his wife Jane Seymour, but also his parents, the first Tudor monarchs, and was also intended to proclaim the fame of the ruling house in word and image. Since the composition probably adorned one wall of the Privy Chamber, a private chamber accessible only to more intimate members of court, the picture was not aimed at a broad public but a select group at court. No contract for the mural survives, but Henry VIII must have commissioned it in the short time during which he was married to Jane Seymour, in other words between May 30, 1536, and October 12, 1537. Both Catharine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn were already dead; in showing Jane together with Elizabeth of York and the Tudor monarchs in the picture, Henry's new connection was presented as the only legitimate one and the children of the marriage as the only rightful heirs. Possibly the picture was commissioned shortly after the wedding: in the surviving section of the cartoon a cartouche is included in the frieze, displaying the initials of Henry and Jane linked in a love knot. According to the copy by the painter Remigius van Leemput (1607-1675) in 1667, the cartouche on the mural as painted bore the date 1537. The picture shows a copy of the figure of Henry VIII from the left side of the mural which was destroyed in the Whitehall fire in 1698. Henry VIII stands in the foreground like a colossus with legs apart and knees straight. His broad shoulders, emphasized by his heavy clothing, exaggerate the already unusual physical presence of this large man, whose sex is additionally stressed by a prominent girdle and codpiece. The king thus appears as the epitome of vigour and potency. This stance, with legs apart and knees locked straight, is very uncommon for the portrait of a king. The reason may be that at the time spread legs were considered improper, as the Frankfurt scholar Jodocus Willich ( 1501-15 52) explains in a treatise on gestures first published in Basle in 1540. However, in visual art the stance was also associated with triumphant heroes; St. George, for example, can stand in a comparable pose after overcoming the dragon.Artist:HOLBEIN, Hans the Younger Title: Henry VIII Painted in 1501-1550 , German - - painting : portrait |
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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),
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