1497 - 1543
so, hansy hans holbein...
Born German but worked hard to overcome this handicap, fleeing to England by
way of Holland so he could pretend to be Dutch. Really overdid it though,
wore clogs all the time and smoked dope and slurred his s's and talked about
cheese, and fooled no-one at all. Because he would divide cheese into
'degenerate cheese' and 'racially healthy cheese' and when he smoked dope he
would hold the joint between his middle and ring fingers, and would never
accept one from anyone who looked semitic, saying, 'No, ich bin cool, man, I
was just building another anyway, you finish that one now that your saliva
is upon it.'
Sitting for a portrait for him was a nightmare: look at Jane Seymour, he's shining a lamp in the poor woman's face. He made her sit there for three
days with no food and water, saying, 'You vill reveal your inner beauty to
me eventually, Fraulein, or you vill not leave zis studio.' Later made a
brief foray into landscape painting, or as he called it, 'the interrogation
of nature', decimating many forests and hanging several sheep to set an
example.
And look at The
Ambassadors, look, look, what's that at the bottom? It's a knife, that's
what, that's a 16th-century forerunner of the shower scene from Psycho, he's
about to stab them to death for denying his claim that Paris was
historically part of greater Germany.
Bloody good painter, though.
Holbein art prints, pictures, here =
Stuff in bookform
Hans Holbein on the web
Related