Hans Sebald Beham

Sebald Beham (1500–1550) was a German painter and printmaker, mainly known for his very small engravings. Born in Nuremberg, he spent the later part of his career in Frankfurt. He was one of the most important of the "Little Masters", the group of German artists making prints in the generation after Dürer.

His name is often given as Hans Sebald Beham although there is no documentary evidence that he ever used that additional forename.

He produced approximately 252 engravings, 18 etchings and 1500 woodcuts, including woodcut book illustrations. He worked extensively on tiny, highly detailed, engravings, many as small as postage stamps, placing him in the German printmaking school known as the "Little Masters" from the size of their prints. Those works were printed and published by him, and his much larger woodcuts were mostly commissioned work. The engravings found a ready market among German bourgeois collectors. He also made prints for use as playing cards and wallpaper.

His engravings cover a range of subjects, but he is especially known for scenes of peasant life and scenes from classical myth or history, both of which often had an erotic element. His early work was done under the shadow of Dürer, who was still working in Nuremberg, and one early woodcut "Head of Christ", to which the "AD" monogram was added in the second state (though probably not by Beham), was long misattributed to Dürer by Adam Bartsch and others. He also borrowed from his brother Barthel's rather more original works. In his later work he boldly re-interpreted many of Dürer's most famous prints in works such as his Melancholia of 1539, exploiting the difference in scale between his work and the original. His dark backgrounds may have been inspired by Italian Niello prints.

Life Charitatis virtus, undated but with the early monogram 'HSP' Beham was born in Nuremberg. Nothing is known of his parents. His brother Bartel Beham, two years his junior, was also an artist.

He is known to have married twice. A pair of models for medals, designed by Matthes Gebel and dating from 1540, shows Beham and his wife Anna. In 1549, by then a widower, Beham married Elizabeth Wolf, the daughter of a shoemaker from Büdingen.

Other work

Beham is best known as a prolific printmaker, but also painted, designed stained glass, and wrote two successful illustrated books, manuals for artists.

Paintings He is known to have designed stained glass in Nuremberg. His only known panel painting, however, is a tabletop painted with scenes from the life of King David, now in the Louvre. This was done following his move to Frankfurt, for Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg. He also painted miniatures for a prayer-book for Albrecht, now in the collection of the Hofbibliothek, Aschaffenburg. was an artists' manual, which he later followed with one on the human figure. These publications were simplified borrowings of Dürer's works on the subjects, but rather easier to use (and cheaper), and thus had a long-lasting success.

Gallery