Jakob Emanuel Handmann

Jakob Emanuel Handmann (16 August 1718 – 3 November 1781) was a Swiss painter who specialised in portrait painting. He was a contemporary of the Swiss painters Anton Graff, Jean Preudhomme, Angelica Kauffman, Johann Jakob Schalch, Johann Caspar Füssli and his son Johann Heinrich Füssli.

Life and work

Handmann was born on 16 August 1718 in Basel, Switzerland. He was the ninth of fourteen children of Johann Jakob Handmann, a baker and later bailiff of Waldenburg, and his wife, Anna Maria Rispach. Between 1735 and 1739, he made an apprenticeship as a stucco plasterer and studied painting in Schaffhausen with the painter and stucco plasterer Johann Ulrich Schnetzler.

He made study trips to Paris, Rome and Naples. From 1739 to 1742, he worked in Paris at the studio of Jean Restout the Younger, who influenced his work. In 1742 Handmann travelled through France finding employment in a portrait studio partnership with the painter Hörling. In the business partnership with Hörling, Handmann was mainly responsible for painting the heads of the sitters. At the end of 1742, Handmann went to Italy and reached Rome in the spring of 1743; he worked among others in the studios of Marco Benefial and Pierre Subleyras in Rome. There he mainly copied masterpieces from the Classical Antiquity and Renaissance periods.

By June 1746, he was back in Switzerland. In 1747 he settled down in Basel. In Basel he opened his own studio. However, many of his clients were patricians from the city and the area of Bern. Thanks to the acquaintance of the Estonian nobleman Colonel Carl Friedrich von Staal, Handmann became a member of the “Accademia Clementina” of Bologna in 1773. Apart from a trip to Germany in 1753, he never again left his native country.

Gallery