Hans Baldung Grien

Around 1503 a young painter from a family of Swabian lawyers and scholars turned up in Nuremberg and joined the busiest workshop in Germany, that of Albrecht Dürer. Hans Baldung became Dürer's best pupil, and when the master left for Italy he left Baldung to run the studio. The two stayed friends for life, and Dürer was still trading prints by him near the end.

But Baldung took his art into territory Dürer avoided. Alongside conventional commissions, his largest being the high altar of Freiburg cathedral, 11 painted panels finished in 1516, he grew obsessed with witches, death, and the female nude, often inside a single image. His recurring subject is Death and the Maiden: a young woman seized by a rotting corpse that grips her hair or her skin. He drew and printed witches' sabbaths just as the witch-hunting manuals were coming off the new printing presses.

The nickname Grien, probably from the green he favoured, was likely used to tell him apart from the other men named Hans in Dürer's crowded shop. He spent most of his working life in Strasbourg, held civic office there, and lived to see the city turn Protestant.