As a son of the Nuremberg painter Hans Schön, Erhard Schön probably spent a portion of his apprentice years in his father's workshop. Between 1513 and 1524, he was mainly engaged in the production of woodcut illustrations for religious texts, among them the 'Hortulus animae', a pre-Reformation collection of prayers that was published between 1516 and 1522 in more than twenty editions and illustrated with woodcuts by Schön and the Dürer pupil Hans Springinklee. It is uncertain whether Schön was involved in such major woodcut projects as the 'Triumphal Arch' (1515) and the 'Theuerdank' (1517) for Emperor Maximilian I. In response to Dürer's theories on proportions, in 1538 he published his own 'Unterweisung der Proportion' (Instruction in Proportions). In the mid-1520s he turned increasingly to Protestantism, and designed polemically satirical woodcuts under the influence of Sebald Beham and Georg Pencz. With some 1,200 illustrations for 116 books and 200 single woodcuts attributed to Schön, he numbers among the most productive designers of his time.
