Hans Leu the Younger

Hans Leu the Younger (ca. 1490 – 24 October 1531) was a Swiss painter, native to Zürich.

He was the son of the painter Hans Leu the Elder, with whom he probably had his first training as an artist.[1] He traveled in Nuremberg ca. 1510 where he worked in the studio of Albrecht Dürer, and he later may have worked with Hans Baldung in Freiburg-im-Breisgau.[2] By 1514 he had returned to Zürich, where he became the city's foremost painter.[3]

As Zürich came under the influence of the iconoclastic church reformer Huldrych Zwingli, commissions for church decorations became scarce.[1] Much of Leu's work was destroyed by followers of Zwingli in 1523.[1] Leu became a mercenary to support himself, and was killed on 24 October 1531 in the battle of Gubel.[3]

Leu's surviving works include a small number of paintings and woodcuts, drawings of religious subjects, and landscape studies.[1] Museums holding works by Leu include the Städel in Frankfurt and the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.[2]

  1. ^ a b c d Hans Leu the Younger, Städel Museum.
  2. ^ a b Eisler, Colin (1975). German Drawings From the 16th Century to the Expressionists. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. p. 134. ISBN 0316225207.
  3. ^ a b Hans Leu the Younger, The British Museum.