Portrait of a young boy with blond hair

Ambrosius Holbein's Portrait of a Young Boy with Blond Hair, painted around 1516 and now at the Kunstmuseum Basel, is the companion to the Portrait of a Young Boy with Brown Hair and together they form a remarkable early document of child portraiture in northern Renaissance art. The Basel of Ambrosius Holbein's career was an intellectually distinguished city where Erasmus was working and where a generation of painters, printmakers, and humanist scholars were creating a distinctive cultural environment. The two boy portraits may document students at one of the humanist schools operating in Basel under reforming educators, or the children of a wealthy civic patron.

The blond boy is rendered with the same precise Holbein technique as his brown-haired companion: careful attention to hair color, facial features, and the slight psychology of childhood rendered without sentimentality. The plain background keeps attention focused entirely on the child's presence.