Portrait of a Young Boy with Brown Hair

The dark-haired boy here has a companion, a fair child painted the same year, 1516, and the two have stayed together in Basel ever since. What holds you up close is the precision. Ambrosius Holbein worked thin and dry, in a technique closer to tinted drawing than to loaded oil, and it suits a young sitter. The soft skin, the slightly uncertain set of the mouth, the separate dark hairs are all put down with a draughtsman's patience. Much of his short working life went into exactly this kind of exact line, designs cut for the printing shops that were making Basel rich. Here that same steadiness is turned on a living child, caught at the age when a face has not yet hardened into an adult's, the eyes doing most of the looking.