Martin Schongauer was a German engraver and painter. He was the most important German printmaker before Albrecht Dürer. Schongauer was born in about 1440 in Colmar, Alsace, probably the third of the four sons of Caspar Schongauer, a goldsmith from Augsburg who taught his son the art of engraving. Colmar is now in France but was then part of the Holy Roman Empire. He may well have been trained by Master E. S. The art historian A. Hyatt Mayor saw both their individual styles in different parts of a single engraving, and all the works with Schongauer’s M†S monogram show a fully developed style. Schongauer established at Colmar a very important school of engraving, out of which grew the “Little Masters” of the succeeding generation, and a large group of Nuremberg artists.