Barbara and Hans Schellenberger

Description

Thin, controlled layers of oil build the two faces in this double portrait, the paint laid in close, even strokes that leave almost no trace of the brush except at the edges of collar and cap, where a slightly thicker touch catches the light. The palette stays narrow and deliberate: dark ground, muted flesh tones warmed with ochre, a few notes of red and black in the costume that carry the eye between the two sitters. It is out of this restraint that the likenesses of Barbara and Hans Schellenberger emerge, steady and exact rather than dramatic.

About Barbara and Hans Schellenberger

Burgkmair, working in Augsburg during the early sixteenth century at the height of the German Renaissance portrait tradition, treats the pairing with the compositional logic typical of marriage portraits of the period: the two figures set close within a shallow pictorial space, their gazes directed outward rather than at one another, their status conveyed through dress and posture rather than gesture. The modelling of the faces shows the fine, almost linear precision associated with painters trained in the workshop tradition of southern Germany, where drawing and paint remain closely bound together. Edges are kept firm and clean, background left dark and unbroken, so that nothing competes with the study of feature and expression.

What distinguishes the work is the discipline of its surface: a sitter is built from thin glazes rather than heavy paint, and the transitions between light and shadow on the skin are managed with a control that leaves very little visible texture, a technical restraint that period specialists still study closely. This quality of surface is exactly what a hand-painted oil painting reproduction has to reconstruct, since a printed copy flattens the very subtlety that gives the original its presence. Painters working on the ByMuseum reproduction build the canvas in the same sequence, thin layer over thin layer, matching the ochre and red of the original palette and keeping the edges as firm and unhurried as Burgkmair left them.

The hand-painted reproduction

Each reproduction is a handmade oil painting, produced by hand rather than assembled by machine, so the surface takes on the accumulated depth of separate applications of colour the way the original does. The finished canvas is checked against the palette and tonal structure of the source image before it leaves the studio, so the balance between the two sitters, and the quiet authority of their expressions, survives the transfer to a new surface.

• Hand-painted oil on canvas, built up in layers by a trained painter
• Available in multiple sizes to suit the wall it will hang on
• Gallery-ready presentation, finished and ready to display
• Certificate of authenticity included with every order
• Painted to order in 2 to 3 weeks, then delivered in 5 to 7 days