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Showing posts with the label Hans Holbein the Younger

Very Rich Hours in Chantilly

It is a once-in-a-lifetime experience: the chance to see one of the greatest -- and most fragile -- works of European art before your very eyes. The illustrated manuscript known as the  Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry contains images that have shaped our view of the late Middle Ages, but it's normally kept under lock and key at the Château de Chantilly, north of Paris. It's only been exhibited twice in the past century. Now newly restored, the glowing pages of  Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry are on show to the public for just a few months. "Approche, approche," the Duke of Berry's usher tells the visitors to the great man's table for the feast that will mark the start of the New Year. It's also your invitation to examine closely the illustration for January, one of the 12 months from the calendar in this Book of Hours -- a collection of prayers and other religious texts -- that form the centrepiece of this exhibition in Chantilly.  It's su...
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Opening and Closing in April

It might be the anniversary year of the French Impressionists , but Tate Modern on London's South Bank has a different agenda, starting on April 25; they're taking a step on in time to explore the world of the avant-garde German  Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider . The Tate has brought together more than 130 works from the likes of Wassily Kandinsky, Marianne von Werefkin, Franz Marc and Gabriele Münter, drawing to a large extent on the holdings of the Lenbachhaus in Munich. The show is on until October 20.  At the National Gallery, a free display from April 18 offers the chance to see The Last Caravaggio . The dramatically lit  Martyrdom of St Ursula  was painted in Naples in 1610, the year Caravaggio died in mysterious circumstances. Coming to London for the first time in 20 years, it'll be on show until July 21.  The Wallace Collection explores the life and times of Ranjit Singh (1780-1839), the first Maharaja of the Sikh Empire in Punjab,...
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Henry VIII's Incomparable Artist

In the eyes of the French poet Nicholas Bourbon, a visitor to England in the mid-1530s during the reign of Henry VIII, Hans Holbein was an "incomparable painter". There's another splendid chance to appreciate the German's unparalleled skill as a portraitist in  Holbein at the Tudor Court at the Queen's Gallery in London, though this exhibition is less a celebration of Holbein the painter -- there are only half a dozen or so large-scale paintings by him in this show -- than of Holbein the draughtsman.  It's these astonishing works that down nearly five centuries have brought to life the characters who were making history during the great upheaval of Henry's reign.  Nicholas Bourbon is there in front of you. As is Thomas More, the hint of stubble on his cheeks picked out in black chalk, the sheen on his fur collar highlighted by leaving the paper blank. We've seen these portraits before, of course, but they never fail to amaze. Henry's reign is whe...
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Opening and Closing in November

It's in the reign of King Henry VIII that English history seems to come to life, to become truly accessible. And part of that is down to the portraits of the royal family and the court by the German artist Hans Holbein the Younger, which retain an uncanny immediacy five centuries on. Holbein at the Tudor Court at the Queen's Gallery in London will display the largest group of Holbein's works from the Royal Collection in more than 30 years, including over 40 of his sublime portrait drawings, of sitters such as Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and Thomas More. It's on from November 10 until April 14. More works on paper at the Royal Academy, but from well over 300 years later: Degas, Cezanne, Morisot , van Gogh, Monet and Toulouse-Lautrec are all represented in Impressionists on Paper , which assembles 77 exhibits to show how the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists transformed art through other media as well as painting. This one runs from November 25 to March 10. November ...
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Charles I -- The Very Image of a King

We all know what Charles I looked like, don't we? It was just how Anthony Van Dyck painted him: Van Dyck's triple portrait is the first image that catches your eye as you enter Charles I: King and Collector  at the Royal Academy in London, a terrific exhibition that's chock-full of great works of art. This show has at its centre two rooms of aggrandising pictures of Charles by his Flemish court painter, on horseback, with his family, in his robes of state. So it comes as somewhat of a surprise to find one or two portraits of the King by other artists that make him appear a little different. There's something slightly wrong with them, you feel, because you're so used to the Van Dyck look. Gerrit van Honthorst's Charles  seems somehow more boyish, less certain of himself, while a full-length view by Daniel Mytens captures some splendid tailoring but doesn't quite give us the self-confidence of a man who believed himself endowed with the divine righ...
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