Hans Schäufelein (c.1482-1539/1540) - Lot and his daughters

Good impression on thin wove paper.

Lot and his daughters; seated in right foreground; Lot's wife as a pillar of salt in left background in front of the burning city of Sodom.
Woodcut

Bibliographic references
Hollstein / German engravings, etchings and woodcuts c.1400-1700 (2)
Dodgson 1903, 1911 / Catalogue of Early German and Flemish Woodcuts in the BM, 2 vols (II.46.210)
Bartsch / Le Peintre graveur (VII.246.4)

Biography
Painter and designer of woodcuts and glass-paintings. Probably born in Nuremberg, where his father, a successful merchant from Nördlingen, a town to the south-west, moved in 1476. Strongly influenced by Albrecht Dürer, in whose studio in Nuremberg he worked from c. 1503. His early woodcuts include illustrations for Ulrich Pinder's ‘Der beschlossen Gart des Rosenkrantz Maria’ (1505) and ‘Speculum passionis’ (1507). After Dürer left Nuremberg for Italy in 1505, Schäufelein was instructed to paint the altarpiece for Ober-St-Veit (Vienna, Diözesanmuseum) after Dürer's design, for which four of Dürer's drawings have survived. His earliest dated painting is the ‘Crucifixion’ of 1508 (Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum). Probably worked with Hans Holbein the Elder in Augsburg during this period. From 1510 to 1515 he was active in Augsburg, where he designed numerous woodcuts for the local printers. In 1513 he painted the high altarpiece for the Benedictine abbey at Auhausen. In 1515 Schäufelein settled in Nördlingen where he was granted citizenship; his most important painting, the ‘Ziegler altarpiece’, dated 1521 is in Nördlingen ( St Georgskirche). He also produced a number of portraits (Warsaw, National Museum; Washington DC, National Gallery of Art, and elsewhere) and many woodcuts, which include contributions to the Emperor Maximilian's ‘Weisskunig’ (1514-16), ‘Theuerdank’ (1517) and ‘Triumphal Procession’ (1516-18). About ninety drawings, mostly from the first fifteen years of Schäufelein's activity, are known to have survived, many of which are signed with his monogram, some with the addition of a small shovel (‘Schäufelein’).

(British Museum)

After the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot was afraid to stay in Zoar and so he and his two daughters resettled into the hills, living in a cave. Concerned for their father having descendants, one evening, Lot's eldest daughter gets Lot drunk and has sex with him without his knowledge. The elder daughter then insisted that her younger sister also get their father, Lot, drunk and have sex with him, which the younger sister duly did on the following night. From these incestuous unions, the older daughter conceived Moab (Hebrew מוֹאָב, lit., "from the father" [meh-Av]), father of the Moabites; while the younger conceived Ben-Ammi (Hebrew בֶּן-עַמִּי, lit., "Son of my people"), father of the Ammonites.

Condition is good. Thinning paper behind a free lower left, unseeable on recto. Remnants of japanese paper mounting hinges at top, verso. Impression of woodcut block coming through verso.