, 1957 Handmann was born on 16 August 1718 in
Basel, Switzerland. He was the ninth of fourteen children of Johann Jakob Handmann, a baker and later
bailiff of
Waldenburg, and his wife, Anna Maria Rispach. Between 1735 and 1739, he made an apprenticeship as a
stucco plasterer and studied painting in
Schaffhausen with the painter and stucco plasterer Johann Ulrich Schnetzler. He made study trips to
Paris,
Rome and
Naples. From 1739 to 1742, he worked in Paris at the studio of
Jean Restout the Younger, who influenced his work. In 1742 Handmann travelled through France finding employment in a portrait studio partnership with the painter Hörling. In the business partnership with Hörling, Handmann was mainly responsible for painting the heads of the sitters. At the end of 1742, Handmann went to Italy and reached
Rome in the spring of 1743; he worked among others in the studios of
Marco Benefial and
Pierre Subleyras in Rome. There he mainly copied masterpieces from the
Classical Antiquity and
Renaissance periods. By June 1746, he was back in Switzerland. In 1747 he settled down in
Basel. In Basel he opened his own studio. However, many of his clients were
patricians from the city and the area of
Bern. Thanks to the acquaintance of the
Estonian nobleman Colonel Carl Friedrich von Staal, Handmann became a member of the “
Accademia Clementina” of
Bologna in 1773. Apart from a trip to
Germany in 1753, he never again left his native country. ==Gallery==