School Master's Signboard (grown-ups' side)

This panel was never meant to hang in a gallery. In 1516 it was an outdoor advertisement, one side of a painted sign that swung in the street in front of the house of a Basel schoolmaster named Oswald Geisshuesler, better known as Myconius. This side shows two grown men bent over their writing under the teacher's eye, and the inscription makes the pitch plainly: anyone who wishes can learn to read and write here, burgher or apprentice, man or woman, boy or girl, and anyone who tries and still fails will owe nothing. On the reverse, painted by Holbein's elder brother Ambrosius, younger children take a reading lesson. Holbein was about 18 and newly arrived in Basel when he took the adults' side. Signs like this rarely survive, which makes a painted shop advertisement from 1516, showing ordinary people at their lessons, one of the earliest genre scenes to come down from north of the Alps.