Hans Bock the Elder

After Hans Holbein the Younger left Basel for good, the city waited two generations for a painter worth the name. That painter was Hans Bock, an Alsatian from Saverne who bought his way into the Basel painters' guild in 1572 and became a citizen the same year. For half a century he was the man Basel's scholars and merchants came to for a portrait or a fresco.

Two of his portraits hang here. Johannes Oporinus was the great Basel printer and humanist who once published the first Latin Qur'an and the anatomy of Vesalius. Felix Platter was the city physician who built one of Europe's earliest natural-history collections. Bock painted them plainly and closely, faces built up in careful light against dark grounds.

He had wider interests than the studio. From 1588 he worked with the collector Basilius Amerbach to dig out the Roman theatre at Augusta Raurica outside the city, drawing the ruins as they came up. His best-known picture, from 1597, is a wide, crowded view of the open-air baths at Leuk in the Valais mountains.