HOLBEIN, Hans, the YOUNGER. — German painter and engraver, born in Augsburg in the winter of 1497–1498 and died between 7 October and 29 November 1543 in London. A pupil of his father, he then went to Basel in 1514, where he first worked as an assistant to Hans Herbster and later on his own account. From these early years of activity are the portraits of J. Meyer, burgomaster of Basel, and his wife (1516), and the frescoes of 1517 in Lucerne, inside and on the façade of the mayor’s house at Hertenstein.
In the summer of 1518 he probably went to Italy, and the influence of Italian art, particularly Lombard art and that of Mantegna, is visible in his immediately subsequent work. Back in Basel in September 1519, he received civic rights a year later. Here (where he enjoyed the friendship of famous men, such as Erasmus of Rotterdam, of whom he made many portraits that began his fame as a portraitist) he was admitted to the guild of artists, worked for the city’s publishers providing illustrations for books, and frescoed the façade of a dance hall (Haus zum Tanz) as well as the Council Hall in the Town Palace (1521). Among other works from this period are the portrait of Boniface Amerbach (1519), who was later to become one of the greatest collectors of his drawings (his collection is in the Kunstsammlung in Basel); the polyptych for Freiburg; and the Madonna of Solothurn (1522).
In 1524 he went to France, where he came into contact with the art of the Clouets, from whom he derived the technique of coloured pencil drawings (his earlier drawings, in fact, are all in silverpoint). It was after this journey that he produced, for the Lyon publishers M. and G. Trechsel, his most celebrated woodcuts, the Imagines mortis and the