Hans Holbein Reading and Research

I have been reading these books about Hans Holbein a 15th Century Artist. It has been interesting to see how artists back then were almost like a photographer as Holbein was used by King Henry Vlll  to go over to other countries to paint women whom Henry had an interest to marry.

This painting by Holbein was a portrait painted of a woman called Anne Lovell, the squirrel and the starling may have been intended to allude her family name, squirrels were also popular pets as early as the 14th century but the image of the starling and the squirrel were likely to have been added into the painting later on as separate studies of them in drawings and is unlikely that the woman would have posed with the animals.

This painting is an example of how Holbein was sent to another country to  paint an accurate portrait of Anne of Cleves in 1538 for the King to decide if he wanted to marry her, when Henry saw the painting he was deceived by the effective and impressive painting and arranged to marry her, however when she arrived in England for the wedding ceremony he was deeply dissapointed by her appearance and called her a 'fat flanders mare'. After this Holbein seemed to have lost the favour of the King.

I really like these chalk drawings done by Holbein, I think the browned paper works well with the simplicity of the chalk with the little detail I think it actually pulls it together and works in harmony together. After reading the book Hans Holbein Oskar Batschmann and Pascall Griener I have become to understand that Holbein may have learnt this choice of medium of chalks from when he was travelling through France, it has been thought that Holbein learnt this technique from Jean Clouet however it is difficult to prove this as Clouet's drawings are made in black and red chalks and very rarely include colours.

These are some of Jean Clouet's drawings:

 Here I can see a big difference in use of colour in contrast to Holbeins drawings as you cannot see the brownness of the paper and there is little use of other colours apart from the red alike that it said in the Holbein book however I found another of Clouet's drawings where I can see a strong similarity in style and colours......

 In both Holbein and Clouet's drawings I love the simplicity of them by using a lot of outlines adding a minimal amount of colour to create such a beautiful image. I like the idea of simplicity being a key and with my style of oil painting I have always struggled with applying a small amount of paint and applied it quite thickly. I want to be able to create something similar with my own medium and see if firstly I would be able to succeed and challenge myself but also learn the effects of applying paint more delicately. I think the delicacy of applying the paint also would be representational of personal emotions as I can physically can feel delicate but by doing this through the paint it isn't being as obvious as it would be if I were to paint cracks on the surface of my skin.