Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

Hans Baldung Grien
1484/5 - 1545
21
Head of a Bearded Man in Three Quarter Profile
Black chalk and stumping.
279 x 206 mm (11 x 8 1 /8 in.)
Provenance: From an album of drawings believed
to have been assembled by Captain William Henry
Shippard RN (1803-1865) and thereafter by descent.
Baldung Grien was active as a painter, printmaker,
draughtsman and stained-glass designer. He was one of
the few artists to have trained in Durer’s studio, though,
as John Rowlands persuasively argued, he should be
celebrated as a distinct and individual master deserving
of far better understanding than just being described as
a follower of Durer 1 . Famous for his fascination with
witchcraft and superstition, he developed much of
his subject matter along themes of the supernatural.
Hans Baldung belonged to a Swabian family of
doctors, lawyers and court bureaucrats; they were
extremely well educated and also prosperous. He
entered Durer’s workshop at the age of 18, around
the same time as Hans Schaufelein and Hans Leu
II. Baldung was left in charge of the studio during
1. Workshop of Baldung Grien, Head of a Man, Basel,
Kunstmuseum, Amerbach Kabinett, Inv. U.VI.41.
Durer’s second trip to Venice (1505-7) but on his
master’s return, he moved to Halle where he had
received two important commissions, the Adoration
of the Magi altarpiece, now in the Gemäldegalerei,
Berlin, and a Saint Sebastian, now in the Nuremberg
city museum which includes a self portrait showing the
artist dressed in green, indicative of the name he had
already acquired in Durer’s studio. In Halle, his works
hung alongside those of Grünewald and the Cranachs.
By the end of the decade he had moved to Strasbourg
where he set up his own workshop and two years later
began work on his masterpiece, the high altarpiece for
the cathedral of Freiburg-im-Breisgau, which consists
of eleven huge panels with a central panel of the
Coronation of the Virgin. The entire group was installed
in 1516 and remains in situ still. Whilst running this
enormous project, Baldung Grien continued to execute
smaller commissions for stained-glass and paintings for
private patrons who generally came from the learned,
humanistic circles established around Strasbourg. He
painted portraits, as well as making woodcuts for book
illustrations, a technique which he had refined working
under Durer. He also created the famous series of
drawings of witches on coloured prepared paper. With
the Lutheran Reformation, his subject matter in general
became less religious and more focused on classical
and allegorical themes. His later paintings became
intensely coloured and like his drawings show a
calligraphic use of line. Baldung Grien appears to have
been a dedicated draughtsman; a sketchbook now in the
Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe is full of fine silverpoint
drawings made in preparation for his paintings. Possibly
on commission, he also made autonomous works on
paper, chiaroscuro drawings over preparation and
virtuoso black and red chalk studies such as the present
one, while the stained glass designs are generally made
in pen and ink 2 .
The facial type of the bearded man studied in this
impressive drawing is notably similar to the heads of
some of the Twelve Apostles depicted on either side
of the central panel of the Coronation of the Virgin in
Baldung Grien’s magnificent altarpiece in Freiburg
Cathedral. The two groups of the twelve Apostles are
highly individualised as figures and were most probably
based on portraits from life. While the present head does
not match any of the Apostles in detail, it creates a similar
impression of solemnity and realism and therefore has
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