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Hofmann [Hoffmann], Samuel
(b Sax, St Gall, 1595; d Frankfurt am Main, 24 January 1649). Swiss painter, active also in the northern Netherlands and Germany. He was descended on his father’s side from an old farming family from the Zurich Oberland; his father was a Protestant pastor. From 1608 to 1611 he trained as a painter with the Zurich painter Gotthard Ringgli (1575–1635). In 1613 he did some restoration work at the monastery of Töss in Winterthur before setting off to travel. By 1615 he was in Amsterdam, where he worked for the next seven and a half years. On 22 May 1622 he married, and the couple lived on the Oude Zijds-Achterburgval. According to Sandrart, he served an apprenticeship with Peter Paul Rubens; this remains unproven. In 1622 he returned to Zurich with his wife and soon became the most popular portrait painter in the town; between 1622 and 1643 he painted most of its dignitaries and numerous citizens (e.g. the burgomaster Hans Heinrich Holzhalb, 1635; Zurich, Ksthaus; Portrait of a Man Aged 60, 1624; Zurich, Schweizer. Landesmus.). Portrait commissions took him in 1628 to Heiligenberg on Lake Constance, where he painted members of the Fürstenberg family (e.g. Leopold Ludwig Egon, Grafen von Fürstenberg-Heiligenberg, Heiligenberg, Schloss Heiligenberg), and in 1630 to the court of the Margrave of Baden-Baden; Sandrart reported that he painted portraits of generals active in the Thirty Years War. Even after leaving Amsterdam he remained in touch with artistic developments in Antwerp and the Netherlands. Some of his full-length court portraits follow the latest trends, and by 1629 he had become one of the first to adopt the style of Anthony van Dyck. In the equestrian portrait of P. F. König (1631; Fribourg, Mus. A. & Hist.), he adopted a type from Rubens. His still-lifes, which include small-format fruit pieces (e.g. Still-life with Fruit and Wineglass, 1636; Zurich, Ksthaus) as well as large-format kitchen studies with several figures (e.g. Kitchen Still-life with Figures, 1640; Zurich, Zunfthaus Meisen), reveal the influence of works by Frans Snyders and Adriaen van Utrecht. In some still-lifes he broke away from his Flemish models and achieved an expressive style of his own, a unique achievement that enriched Swiss painting.
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