Holbein Portrait Drawings (Dover Fine Art, History of Art)
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Holbein Portrait Drawings (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) Details
From the Back Cover Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543) ranks among history’s most gifted and perceptive portrait painters. His objectivity, realism, and superb draftsmanship have influenced artists and commanded the admiration of the world for over four centuries.This handsome volume presents 44 of Holbein’s finest portrait drawings, created while he worked as court painter to Henry VIII. This artist’s record of one of the world’s most brilliant and tempestuous courts, in drawings and finished portraits executed with inimitable sensitivity and impeccable draftsmanship, is unique in the annals of history and art. Here are revealing, detailed depictions of a gallery of powerful personalities: Sir Thomas More; Jane Seymour; Edward, Prince of Wales; Anne Boleyn; William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury; Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey; Sir Thomas Wyatt; Nicholas Bourbon the Elder; and many others. Informative captions provide identification of the sitters, dates, dimensions of the drawings, and notes on the media.Today the original drawings can be seen only in the collection of the Royal Library at Windsor. This inexpensive Dover edition makes them widely available to all art lovers. Moreover, every effort has been made to retain the quality of the originals—subtleties of tone and shading, fine detail, and telling nuances of expression. The drawings comprise a priceless archive of important personalities in Henrician England, a record of great value to historians, scholars, costume and cultural historians—anyone interested in that turbulent era and the astounding painter who helped preserve it.Dover (1985) original publication. Read more
Reviews
As other reviewers have noted, this is a book with sub-par reproductions of some of Holbein's more famous pictures. Since I'd read the reviews and knew this going in, and since I found it for a low price as a used book, I decided to add it to my Tudor-history collection anyway.I'm glad I bought it, but it is not at all what I've come to expect of most Dover publications. I don't understand why they didn't get appropriate permissions and put together a book of quality reproductions. I'd have asked for a refund if I had purchased this book new and for full price.You can find copies of most of Holbein's work on the internet, and many of them are high-resolution, very clear and worth the trouble of searching them out. If you want to have hard-copies to hand, this book will fill the bill - but find a low-priced copy, as it hasn't much value, to my mind.
