around 1497 -1543 · Augsburg, Basel and London

Sovereign precision, contained psychology and virtuosity of objects make Hans Holbein the Younger the great portraitist of humanist Europe and Tudor.

Hans Holbein the Younger was born in Augsburg around 1497 or 1498 in the studio of his father, Hans Holbein the Elder. With his brother Ambrosius, he went to Basel around 1515, a city of printers and humanists. He drew for books, painted sets, religious subjects and portraits, and became involved with Erasmus of Rotterdam. Orders weakened by the Reformation encouraged him to go to England in 1526 with a recommendation from Erasmus to Thomas More. Holbein captured the face, costume and status with an accuracy that was never reduced to inventory. Returning briefly to Basel, he settled permanently in London in 1532 and became a painter to Henry VIII. The portraits of the king, of Thomas More, courtiers and marriage candidates still give a face to the Tudor world today. The Ambassadors push this ambition further: scientific instruments, books, textiles and skull anamorphosis bring knowledge, power, religious division and mortality into tension. Holbein prepares his portraits with drawings of extraordinary vivacity, often enhanced with colored chalk. He also designs jewelry, weapons, cuts, miniatures and court decorations. Its smooth surface conceals the work so that the model appears immediately present. Died in London in 1543, probably during an epidemic, he left one of the most precise and complex visual testimonies of the Northern Renaissance. The "Hans Holbein the Younger" selection notably compares The Ambassadors and Portrait of Henry VIII. Its reading favors space.

Holbein describes everything - skin, fur, paper, metal, look - but this precision never closes the portrait: it makes the model more present and more difficult to exhaust.