ART OF EUROPE

Hans Holbein - art prints, pictures

1497 - 1543

[Hans Holbein - art prints, posters - The Ambassadors] 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