Black chalk and stumping.
279 x 206 mm (11 x 8⅛ 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 Dürer’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 Dürer1. 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 Dürer’s workshop at the age of 18, around the same time as Hans Schaufelein and Hans Leu. Baldung was left in charge of the studio during Dürer’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 Dürer’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 Strasburg. He painted portraits, as well as making woodcuts for book illustrations, a technique which he had refined working under Dürer. 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 ink2.
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 been associated, despite its clearly superior quality with a published group of portrait drawings also linked with the altarpiece3. Six of these drawings, all executed in black chalk, are in the Kunstmuseum in Basel and superficially, they appear to be drawn in a similar manner with long curving strokes of the chalk and careful shading and stumping. They are, however, uniform in their lack of spontaneity and animation, absences giving them the appearance of being copies or workshop exercises. The same cannot be said of the present drawing in which the subtlety and variation of the handling creates a vivid sense of the person depicted. Intriguingly, the sitter wears a fur-collared coat, which already differentiates him from the Apostles who are dressed in full- length linen robes and from the Basel drawings which mostly show tunics. This difference, combined with the fact that the sitter looks reflectively within rather than at something specific as the Apostles do, highlights the possibility that rather than being a study related to the altarpiece, it is a working likeness either itself done to commission or in preparation for a painted portrait.
The function of Hans Baldung’s drawings is often unclear, as has been pointed out by Martha Wolff, and whether the chalk drawings in general are preparatory stages, or part of a broader workshop process has yet to be established4. What is clear is that the range of drawings associated with Baldung Grien are widely differing in quality and, presumably, purpose. While the Basel group mentioned above must surely be part of a workshop production, a drawing such as the well-known red chalk study of two male heads in the British Museum must count as an example of the master’s most characteristic, virtuoso work in which patterns are created out of the lines of shading and the facial features are given an exaggerated style making the heads into slightly fantastical types5. Certainly a good proportion of Hans Baldung’s work, both in prints and drawings, have a heightened expressiveness in the tradition of Grünewald who was active around Strasburg at the time. The present head, in comparison, shows a great attention to fine and realistic detail, in the movement of the dense and flowing wing beard, the shell like whorls of the ear and, most particularly, in the extraordinary subtlety of the treatment of the eyes and eyebrows and the shading of the skin.
While Frits Koreny and Christof Metzger, both of whom have recently examined the drawing, consider it to be of clearly greater artistic merit than the rather static drawings in Basel, Frits Koreny believes the present sheet to be the work of an assistant of Hans Baldung; Christof Metzger, on the other hand, judging the style and fineness of the draughtsmanship and the particular manner in which the eyes, hair and beard are drawn, believes it to be by Baldung Grien himself, suggesting that it was indeed made at the same time as the great altarpiece. The aspects of the drawing which Christof Metzger highlights: its superior quality and expressivity, the fine modelling and characteristic technique of using dark outlines and stumping, the brilliant depiction of the eyes together with the highly effective evocation of the fur coat all support the attribution and, further, argue for this being a work of direct observation, a face to face study with a realistic purpose in mind. In effect it is also an examination of the processes of age and thought acting on a human head and perhaps in this respect it is a step towards one of Baldung Grien’s well-known monogrammed woodcuts, the Head of an Old Man from 1518/196.
On Dürer’s death in 1528, Baldung is recorded as having been left a lock of his former master’s hair. Joseph Koerner suggested, that this could have acted as the transmission of an artistic inheritance, a symbol not only of the relationship of master to former pupil, now himself an established artist, but also of a shared fascination with depicting hair and fur and of the ambivalence and duality which is often at the heart of both their works7.
NOTES
1 See John Rowlands, review of Hans Baldung Grien, exhibition Washington and Yale, Burlington Magazine, April 1981, vol. 123, no.937, p.263.
2 See Christiane Andersson in the Dictionary of Art. See also Carl Koch, Die Zeichnungen Hans Baldung Griens, Berlin 1941.
3 Tilman Falk, Hans Baldung Grien im Kunstmuseum Basel, exhib. cat., Basel Kunstmuseum, 1978, cats.35-40 and figs. 37, 41, 44-
47. The Basel drawings are all watermarked with either a small crown or a bull’s head, while the present sheet bears a watermark of a bunch of grapes, consistent with a pre 1639 date, according to Peter Bower, (Feldkirch 1539 being a similar example).
4 See Martha Wolff, review of ‘Hans Baldung Grien, Prints and Drawings, Chicago 1981, in Renaissance Quarterly, Summer 1983, vol.36, no.2, p.253.
5 See John Rowlands, Drawings by German Artists …, The Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century …, British Museum, 1993, vol. I, cat.61,
p.32 and vol. II, pl.61.
6 See Matthias Mende, Hans Baldung Grien, Das Graphische Werk, Unterschneidheim 1978, cat.70.
7 See Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, Chicago and London, 1993, pp. 250-251.
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