Hans Holbein

Hans Holbein, the son of Hans Holbein the Elder (1465–1524) and Anna Mair Holbein, was born in Augsburg, Bavaria, in about 1497. His father, a Roman Catholic, was a successful artist who specialized in religious paintings. Hans and his brother, Ambrosius, worked on projects with their father. (1)

Holbein migrated to Basel in Switzerland. As his biographer, Derek Wilson, has pointed out: "Holbein... had to accept any commission that was going - jewellery designs, signboards, painted furniture, decorated house fronts, title-pages for printed books, and whatever hackwork could be turned into rye bread, beer, sausage or salt herring." (2)

Holbein developed an interest in the Italian Renaissance. He became influenced by the work of Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald and Hans Baldung. In 1515 he met Desiderius Erasmus and after he was given a copy of Praise of Folly he decorated it with sketches in the margins. (3)

In 1516 he was commissioned to paint the portrait of the wealthy Jacob Meyer, who was later to head the Catholic Party in opposition to the reformers. Susan Foister has pointed out: "Holbein's earliest surviving dated paintings are the portraits of Jacob Meyer, burgomeister or mayor of Basel, and his second wife, Dorothea Kannengiesser, painted in 1516, and originally joined together to form a diptych. These vivid but sober and carefully designed images, taken from still surviving drawings carefully recording the sitters' likenesses, and set within ambitious architectural space made sumptuous by Renaissance ornament, established the artistic foundations for the making of Holbein's reputation in Basel, as well as his later career." (4)

Hans Holbein was commissioned to create an image of Martin Luther. Published in 1523 it depicted Luther as the Greek super-hero and god, Hercules, attacking people with a viciously spiked club. In the picture, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, Duns Scotus and Nicholas of Lyra already lay bludgeoned to death at his feet and the German inquisitor, Jacob van Hoogstraaten was about to receive his fatal stroke. Suspended from a ring in Luther's nose was the figure of Pope Leo X. (5)

The author of Out of the Storm: The Life and Legacy of Martin Luther (2007) has argued: "What was clever about this print (and what has made it difficult for later ages to determine its true message) was that it was capable of various interpretations. Followers of Luther could see their champion represented as a truly god-like being of awesome power, the agent of divine vengeance. Classical scholars, delighting in the many subtle allusions (such as the representation of the triple-tiaraed pope as the three-bodied monster, Geryon) could applaud the vivid representation of Luther as the champion of falsehood over medieval error. Yet, papalists could look on the same image and see in it a vindication of Leo's description of the uncouth German as the destructive wild boar in the vineyard and, for this reason, the engraving received a very mixed reception in Wittenberg." (6)

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In 1524 he broadened his education by a visit to France, to Lyons and Avignon. According to Roy Strong, the author of Holbein: The Complete Paintings (1980): "The influence of this journey can be traced in his designs for the decorative arts and in his portraiture which shows a familiarity with the work of the Clouet school." (7)

When he returned to Switzerland, ike most artists of this period, Holbein mainly painted religious subjects, specializing in painting altarpieces. This included religious paintings that appeared in Basel Cathedral. However, Basel came under the influence of the teachings of Martin Luther. He did not approve of highly decorated churches and so Holbein found it difficult to find work. Holbein decided to live in a country that still remained Catholic. (8) Desiderius Erasmus wrote a letter to his friend Thomas More. "Here the arts are freezing, so Holbein is on the way to England to pick up some coins there." (9) Holbein was invited to live in More's Chelsea home. (10)

Hans Holbein & Thomas More

More agreed to sit for Holbein and the art critic Helen Langdon has commented. "Holbein presents the public figure, robed in authority (for all his saintly reputation More was ferocious enough to condemn heretics to be burnt.) The determined severity of countenance betrays little of the retiring scholar, although this is suggested in the figure's slight sloop. More was certainly concerned with the impression he made, insisting on having the flamboyant cuffs on his official costume replaced by ascetic plain ones." (11) Jasper Ridley believed that the painting accurately captured his character, "a tight-lipped fanatic". (12)

Waldermar Januszczak disagrees with Ridley. "Sir Thomas More was the man who famously stood up to Henry, who refused to accept the king as the new head of the church. So Henry had him beheaded. I grew up believing that More was a man of principle. That is why the Catholic Church made him a saint in 1535. But more recently, a new Thomas More has been proposed to us. In today's histories he is often presented as a demented religious bigot. As a cruel slayer of heretics. That is what modern novelists and playwrights have been making of More. But it was not what Holbein makes of him (in his portrait of More) and Holbein was there." (13)

Thomas Wolsey — Thomas More by Hans Holbein (1527)

Hans Holbein also painted the whole More family: "Thomas More and his family were still settling into their new house near the river Thames when they all posed for Holbein. It was a new kind of portrait – an emotional revolution, even. For this Tudor statesman did not just want Holbein to paint him, but to include all his nearest and dearest in what was clearly intended as a companionate image of family life, like nothing hitherto seen in Britain. Women and men all gather together sociably in a little community. On the compositional drawing that survives, More has annotated Holbein’s design. Next to Holbein’s depiction of his wife kneeling, More asks for a change – she should be sitting in a chair, not kneeling like a servant!" (14)

Roy Strong points out that "no artist with Holbein's skill or with his experience of all that had been achieved in Renaissance of all that had been achieved in Renaissance Italy had been in England." (15) However, Holbein's work failed to make much of an impact in his adopted country. Thomas More was one of the few people impressed by Holbein as an artist and on 18th December, 1526, wrote to Desiderius Erasmus about his first few months in England: "Your painter... is a wonderful artist, but I fear he is not likely to find England so fertile as he hoped. Yet I will do my best to see that he does not find it absolutely barren." (16) More arranged for Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, to sit for Holbein. (17)

Nicolas Kratzer, the tutor to the children of Thomas More, was painted in 1528. Henry Guildford, Controller of the Royal Household, and his wife, Mary Guildford, also agreed to have their portraits painted. Helen Langdon has argued: "An impression of bulk and weight dominates both paintings; Sir Henry dress in particular is rich and lavish, and much gold paint has been used in the costume and in the collar of the garter... Holbein's portraits from this first short stay in England have a particular interest in that they capture much of the dignity and nobility of More and his circle in this period of hope. The portraits are characterized by a warmth of human feeling and by an undramatic presentation that convinces us of its complete truthfulness. They are perhaps the most approachable of Holbein's portraits; the flawlessness of his technique, the patient description of details which create the superbly realistic likenesses." (18)

Hans Holbein returned to Switzerland in 1528. Holbein had retained his membership of the painters' guild in Basel and seems not to have wanted to sever his links with the town. Two years was the normal maximum period of absence allowed to a Basel citizen, and the town council ruled that no citizen could enter the "service of a foreign prince". Over the next four years he produced designs for book illustrations and stained glass. (19) Hilary Mantel has made the point that at this stage in his career he was seen "as a jobbing decorator who you would call in to design a tassel, a gold cup, a salt cellar or the scenery for a pageant". (20)

In 1529 Basel officially became a Protestant city. "To celebrate gangs of rabid iconoclast rampaged through the churches looking for Madonnas to trample and smash. On the 9th February 1529, a gang of some 200 angry Lutherans broke into Basel Cathedral and began attacking the art, statures, crucifixes, Holbein's paintings and they did not stop until all their religious idolatry, as they saw it was destroyed." (21) Holbein continued to find some work after the attack on Basel Cathedral but by 1532 things had become so difficult he decided to return to England.

Artist of the Royal Court

At first Holbein concentrated on painting portraits of European merchants living in London such as Georg Gisze and Derich Born. In 1533 he was commissioned to paint, Robert Cheeseman, a government official. Helen Langdon has argued that this portrait marked a change from his previous work: "Cheeseman was the sort of patron of whom Holbein concentrated during the first few years of his second English sojourn... The need for clear, effective portrayal, shorn of symbolism (and expensively painted detail) perhaps accounts for the innovatory use of the information about the sitter, that floats in gold lettering on the blue background." (22)

In 1533 Hans Holbein produced The Ambassadors. It shows Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, who were in England on a mission for King François of France to discuss the quarrel between Henry VIII and Pope Pope Clement VII over his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Certain details could be interpreted as references to contemporary religious divisions. The broken lute string may signify religious discord, while the Lutheran hymn book may be a plea for Christian harmony. As Tim Marlow has pointed out: "A fabulously accomplished painting, which at first sight simply shows a French scholar and a clergyman. However, it’s loaded with clues to its true meaning. You can see celestial and earthly globes, mathematical instruments, a broken lute and much more. The two most brilliant details are almost hidden from view. The first is in the top left corner, where the curtain is open just enough to see a crucifix. The second is the anamorphic skull in the foreground, which only becomes clear when you study the painting at an acute angle. Holbein is showing that in order to grasp the full picture, you need to see things from more than one perspective." (23)

Hans Holbein also painted Thomas Cromwell during this period. The original is lost but a very good copy can be found at the Frick Art Museum. (24) Several critics have argued that Holbein has painted Cromwell in a very unsympathetic way. Joan Acocella has pointed out: "He (Cromwell) wrote the laws making the King, not the Pope, the head of the English Church, and declaring the English monasteries, with all their wealth, the property of the Crown. To achieve these epochal changes, he had to impose his will on many people, and that is clear in Holbein’s painting. Cromwell is hard and heavy and dressed all in black. His mean little eyes peer forward, as if he were deciding whom to pillory, whom to send to the Tower." (25) The authors of Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England (2000) agree and suggest that "of all the portraits that Holbein did at the English court, the portrait of Cromwell has always seemed the least flattering to it's subject, the most viciously mocking." (26)

Waldermar Januszczak has argued that the portrait of Thomas Cromwell is an accurate representation of the man: "When I was at school Cromwell was portrayed by everyone as a terrible man. Henry VIII's enforcer, the destroyer of the monasteries, in recent years there has been a big reassessment and the modern image of him, the one you find of him in books, plays, as a decent and brilliant man, trapped in a difficult situation. Cromwell we are now told was an early civil servant who channeled power away from the monarchy and the man who invented the bureaucratic modern state. These days we are encouraged to see Cromwell as a good guy, but in this film I am not going to do that... Holbein's portrait of him (Cromwell).... Just look at him. He has a hard and charmless presence. Those piggy eyes, that blank expression, Cromwell is surely the least attractive sitter in the whole of Holbein's art... Holbein was actually there, who happened to be the greatest portrait painter of his time." (27)

Hilary Mantel feels that Holbein has been unfair on Cromwell: "Thomas Cromwell had not yet acquired his status as Henry’s chief minister; as the paper on his desk informs us, he was Master of the Jewel House. A gregarious, cosmopolitan man who had spent time in Italy and the Low Countries, he was probably better placed to know Holbein’s worth than many of his courtier contemporaries. The politician and the painter, both due to rise rapidly at Henry’s court, were bound together by a network of shared friends and shared interests. But the portrait is not a friendly one.... There are no metaphors in his Cromwell picture. There is no echo of his portrait of Thomas More: none of that swift intelligence, intensity, engagement with the viewer. What you see is what you get. Cromwell looks like a man hard to reach and hard to impress. He does not invite you to conversation. His posture is attentive, though, as if he might be listening to someone or something beyond the frame. Of course, a Tudor statesman who commissioned his portrait didn’t want to look bonny. He wanted to look powerful; he was the hand, the arm, of the state." (28)

Hans Holbein and Henry VIII

It seems that Holbein first began working for Henry VIII in 1533. The first evidence of Holbein working for the royal family is a design he made for triumphal arches for the processional route of his wedding party. (29) He also designed a cradle for Princess Elizabeth. (30) In January 1534 Anne Boleyn gave Henry a golden table fountain that incorporated her heraldic falcon, that had been designed by Holbein. (31) Holbein acted not only as a portraitist but also as a fashion designer for the court. He made designs for all the state robes of the king and left more than 250 drawings for everything from "buttons and buckles to pageant weapons, horse out-fittings, and book-bindings for the royal household." (32)

In about 1536 Hans Holbein painted a portrait of Henry that was probably sent abroad on a diplomatic mission. Helen Langdon has pointed out: "This is the quintessential image of the overbearing and tyrannous monarch... Holbein depicts the King without flattery, emphasizing the small, humourless eyes and mouth, the curiously flat cheeks and chin. Henry's bulk and capricious authority haunts the work despite its small size. Its condensation of magnificence run riot here takes the form of real gold used in the chain, jewellery and collar." (33)

The art critic, Tom Lubbock, has added: "Hans Holbein was a memorable icon-maker. He established the image of Henry VIII for all time. His standing portrait of the king has influenced every subsequent picture or impersonation. But it is his other, close-up portrait that has real iconic force. This small and portable head-and-shoulders likeness is no bigger than an A4 sheet. It was, perhaps, made to go abroad on a diplomatic mission. It's constructed not only as a portrait but as a substitute effigy.... Holbein's high-definition realism, his inexhaustibly accurate observation, are forced into a rigorously artificial design. The most outrageous trick is the way the whole right-hand edge of the king's face, from eye to chin, is made into a precisely straight, precisely vertical line. Likewise the top of his shoulders becomes a near horizontal line going right across the picture, making the king's torso beneath it into a sub-rectangle. And this vertical and horizontal intersect in a right angle, which defines the top-right rectangle of the pure ultramarine blue background. The edge of back of the head, behind the ear, also has a straight, upright, run, which meets the jutting-out back of the black hat in another right angle. And there's another horizontal in the straight top edge of the chest-piece. We're also encouraged to see him as a pattern, laid out on the surface of the wood. His body is an ornamental arrangement, made of distinct pieces of opulent fabric – linen, fur, embroidery, gold cloth." (34)

According to Helen Langdon, it was during this period that Thomas Cromwell, with the aid of a team of pamphleteers, organised a propaganda campaign "to create an image of royalty so powerful that it should compel the loyalty formerly reserved for the more ancient power of Rome." Langdon goes on to argue that his master-stroke "was to realize how Holbein could communicate these new concepts in paint, and it is Holbein's vision of Henry VIII, massive, ruthless and dominating, that still persists today." (35)

Hans Holbein produced many paintings of Henry VIII but the one above is the only one accepted by all scholars as being from Holbein's own hand. Most of the images we have are copies by other artists of Holbein's originals. For example, in 1537 Holbein produced a large wall painting for the Privy Chamber in Whitehall Palace that showed Henry, his third wife, Jane Seymour, and his parents, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. Unfortunately it was destroyed in a fire that took place in 1698. The drawings that were made by Holbein for the painting have survived. (36)

The copies of the original Holbein paintings showed "a face already enlarged to spade shape, a tight little mouth, tiny eyes and a beard vainly attempting to conceal the lost of a chin." He is usually shown wearing a hat that "hides the head which has become bald". Antonia Fraser has pointed out that "with his great height and commensurate girth the King was on his way to becoming, in physical terms at least, the most formidable prince in Europe." (37)

Hans Holbein also painted Richard Southwell, a close associate of Thomas Cromwell. (38) Helen Langdon has argued that Southwell was involved in the arrest and execution of his friend, Sir Thomas More and this is reflected in the painting: "As might be surmised from the somewhat cold and sinister expression on Southwell's face, he has come down to posterity as one of the most calculating and treacherous members of Henry VIII's court. He became a creature of Thomas Cromwell and was instrumental in aiding Richard Rich in his attempts to force the imprisoned Sir Thomas More to incriminate himself in 1532." (39) Other portraits painted or drawn during this period includes Sir Thomas Elyot, Margaret Barrow, William Reskimer, Margaret Butts, Simon George and Charles de Morette.

Anne of Cleves

Jane Seymour died on 24th October 1537. Henry showed little interest in finding a fourth wife. However, when Thomas Cromwell told him that he should consider finding another wife for diplomatic reasons, Henry agreed. "Suffering from intermittent and unsatisfied lust, and keenly aware of his advancing age and corpulence" he thought that a new young woman in his life might bring back the vitality of his youth. (40) As Antonia Fraser has pointed out: "In 1538 Henry VIII wanted - no, he expected - to be diverted, entertained and excited. It would be the responsibility of his wife to see that he felt like playing the cavalier and indulging in such amorous gallantries as had amused him in the past." (41)

Cromwell's first choice was Marie de Guise, a young widow who had already produced a son. Aged only 22 she had been married to Louis, Duke of Longueville before his early death in June 1537. He liked the reports that he received that she was a tall woman. He was "big in person" and he had need of "a big wife". In January 1538 he sent a ambassador to see her. (42) When Marie was told that Henry found her size attractive she is reported to have replied that she might be a big woman, but she had a very little neck. Marie rejected the proposal and married King James V of Scotland on 9th May 1538. (43)

The next candidate was Christina of Denmark, the sixteen-year-old widowed Duchess of Milan. She married Francesco II Sforza, the Duke of Milan at the age of twelve. However, he died the following year. Christina was very well connected. Her father was the former King Christian II of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Her mother, Isabella of Austria, was the sister of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Henry VIII received a promising report from John Hutton. "She is not pure white as (Jane Seymour) but she hath a singular good countenance, and, when she chanceth to smile there appeareth two pits in her cheeks, and one in her chin, the witch becometh her right excellently well." He also compared her to Margaret Shelton, one of Henry's former mistresses. (44)

Impressed by Hutton's description, Henry VIII sent Hans Holbein to paint her. He arrived in Brussels on 10th March 1538 and the following day sat for the portrait for three hours wearing mourning dress. However, Christina was disturbed by Henry's treatment of Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn and apparently told Thomas Wriothesley, "If I had two heads, one should be at the King of England's disposal." (45) Wriothesley told Cromwell that he should look for a bride "in some such other place".

Henry was very disappointed as he loved the painting and looked at it on a regular basis. (46) Helen Langdon has explained: "Holbein's achievement is all the more astonishing when we realize that he was granted a sitting of only three hours, during which he probably made a likeness in chalk or water-colours, working it up into a full-length portrait after his return to England. Amongst Holbein's royal portraits the painting is remarkable for its fresh perception of the individual, whilst retaining all the formality of the state portrait. The sitter gazes directly at the spectator; her features are soft and sensitive, seemingly capable of movement and expression." (47)

In 1539 Thomas Cromwell sent Robert Barnes to Copenhagen to discuss Anglo-Danish relations, in particular the prospect of an anti-papal alliance that might involve Henry VIII marrying Anne of Cleves, the daughter of John III. (48) He thought this would make it possible to form an alliance with the Protestants in Saxony. An alliance with the non-aligned north European states would be undeniably valuable, especially as Charles V of Spain and François I of France had signed a new treaty on 12th January 1539. (49)

As David Loades has pointed out: "Cleves was a significant complex of territories, strategically well placed on the lower Rhine. In the early fifteenth century it had absorbed the neighbouring country of Mark, and in 1521 the marriage of Duke John III had amalgamated Cleves-Mark with Julich-Berg to create a state with considerable resources... Thomas Cromwell was the main promoter of the scheme, and with his eye firmly on England's international position, its attractions became greater with every month that passed." (50)

John III died on 6th February, 1539. He was replaced by Anne's brother, Duke William. In March, Nicholas Wotton, began the negotiations at Cleves. He reported to Thomas Cromwell that "she (Anne of Cleves) occupieth her time most with the needle... She can read and write her own language but of French, Latin or other language she hath none... she cannot sing, nor play any instrument, for they take it here in Germany for a rebuke and an occasion of lightness that great ladies should be learned or have any knowledge of music." (51)

Cromwell was desperate for the marriage to take place but was aware that Wotton's reported revealed some serious problems. The couple did not share a common language. Henry VIII could speak in English, French and Latin but not in German. Wotton also pointed out that she "had none of the social skills so prized at the English court: she could not play a musical instrument or sing - she came from a culture that looked down on the lavish celebrations and light-heartedness that were an integral part of King Henry's court". (52)

Wotton was frustrated by the stalling tactics of William. Eventually he signed a treaty in which the Duke granted Anne a dowry of 100,000 gold florins. (53) However, Henry refused to marry Anne until he had seen a picture of her. Hans Holbein arrived in April and requested permission to paint Anne's portrait. The 23-year-old William, held Puritan views and had strong ideas about feminine modesty and insisted that his sister covered up her face and body in the company of men. He refused to allow her to be painted by Holbein. After a couple of days he said he was willing to have his sister painted but only by his own court painter, Lucas Cranach. (54)

Henry was unwilling to accept this plan as he did not trust Cranach to produce an accurate portrait. Further negotiations took place and Henry suggested he would be willing to marry Anne without a dowry if her portrait, painted by Holbein pleased him. Duke William was short of money and agreed that Holbein should paint her picture. He painted her portrait on parchment, to make it easier to transport in back to England. Nicholas Wotton, Henry's envoy watched the portrait being painted and claimed that it was an accurate representation. (55)

Holbein's biographer, Derek Wilson, argues that he was in a very difficult position. He wanted to please Thomas Cromwell but did not want to upset Henry VIII: "If ever the artist was nervous about the reception of a portrait he must have been particularly anxious about this one... He had to do what he could to sound a note of caution. That meant that he was obliged to express his doubts in the painting. If we study the portrait of Anne of Cleves we are struck by an oddity of composition.... Everything in it is perfectly balanced: it might almost be a study in symmetry - except for the jewelled bands on Anne's skirt. The one on her left is not complemented by another on the right. Furthermore, her right hand and the fall of her left under-sleeve draw attention to the discrepancy. This sends a signal to the viewer that, despite the elaborateness of the costume, there is something amiss, a certain clumsiness... Holbein intended giving the broadest hint he dared to the king. Henry would not ask his opinion about his intended bride, and the painter certainly could not venture it. Therefore he communicated unpalatable truth through his art. He could do no more." (56)

Unfortunately, Henry VIII did not understand this coded message. As Alison Weir, the author of The Six Wives of Henry VIII (2007) has pointed out, the painting convinced Henry to marry Anne. "Anne smiles out demurely from an ivory frame carved to resemble a Tudor rose. Her complexion is clear, her gaze steady, her face delicately attractive. She wears a head-dress in the Dutch style which conceals her hair, and a gown with a heavily bejewelled bodice. Everything about Anne's portrait proclaimed her dignity, breeding and virtue, and when Henry VIII saw it, he made up his mind at once that this was the woman he wanted to marry." (57)

Anne of Cleves arrived at Dover on 27th December 1539. She was taken to Rochester Castle and on 1st January, Sir Anthony Browne, Henry's Master of the Horse, arrived from London. At the time Anne was watching bull-baiting from the window. He later recalled that the moment he saw Anne he was "struck with dismay". Henry arrived at the same time but was in disguise. He was also very disappointed and retreated into another room. According to Thomas Wriothesley when Henry reappeared they "talked lovingly together". However, afterwards he was heard to say, "I like her not". (58)

The French ambassador, Charles de Marillac, described Anne as looking about thirty (she was in fact twenty-four), tall and thin, of middling beauty, with a determined and resolute countenance". He also commented that her face was "pitted with the smallpox" and although he admitted there was some show of vivacity in her expression, he considered it "insufficient to counterbalance her want of beauty".

However, as Alison Plowden, the author of Tudor Women (2002) has pointed out "Holbein's miniature is by no means without charm, and compared with, say, the portrait of Queen Jane Seymour, her successor would seem to have little to be ashamed of." (59) Antonia Fraser has argued that Holbein's painting was indeed accurate and Henry's reaction is best explained by the nature of erotic attraction. "The King had been expecting a lovely young bride, and the delay had merely contributed to his desire. He saw someone who, to put it crudely, aroused in him no erotic excitement whatsoever." (60)

It is claimed by some sources that Henry VIII was not pleased with Holbein's painting of Anne of Cleves and after the marriage that took place on 6th January 1540, he was not asked to do any more work for the royal family. (61) Derek Wilson points out that this is untrue as Henry commissioned Holbein to paint portraits of Prince Edward and Catherine Howard. (61)

Hans Holbein died from the plague in November 1543.

Primary Sources

(1) Hans Reinhardt, Holbein (1538)

Before reaching his full activity at Basle, Holbein spent time in travelling. We find him in 1517 at Lucerne, where he was associated with the members of the brotherhood of St. Luke. He worked there for families of the aristocracy, and it was for one of them that, aged barely twenty, he undertook the decoration of the facade of a house. The frescoes on the Hertenstein house prove that he was not only capable of producing small sketches, but that he was also a real master of the art of mural decoration... From 1519 onwards, Holbein's style shows a completely new vigour, and he displays a special enthusiasm for architectural perspectives in a pure Renaissance style, which appear to have made a deep impression on him.

(2) Letter of introduction from Desiderius Erasmus to his friend Thomas More (29 August, 1526)

Here the arts are freezing, so Holbein is on the way to England to pick up some coins there.

(3) Thomas More, letter to Desiderius Erasmus (18 December, 1526)

Your painter... is a wonderful artist, but I fear he is not likely to find England so fertile as he hoped. Yet I will do my best to see that he does not find it absolutely barren.

(4) Susan Foister, Hans Holbein : Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004-2014)

For More, Holbein also painted a remarkable group portrait on linen cloth (lost, known only through copies and a series of original drawings). One drawing (Kunstmuseum, Basel), shows the whole composition, with annotations by Holbein recording changes which More had presumably requested. The composition is modelled on contemporary depictions of the holy kindred, adapted to include a Tudor interior and the likenesses of More's own immediate kin, who were identified on the drawing by Nikolaus Kratzer, so that the sketch could be sent to their friend Erasmus in Basel; the latter recorded his delight on receiving it. The portrait drawings for the heads in this group and for those of most of the other portraits mentioned from this period are still preserved (in the Royal Collection; that of Lady Guildford is at Basel). Both portrait drawings and the corresponding painted heads are notable for Holbein's sensitivity to characterization and to details such as the light glinting on the stubble of More's beard in the painted portrait or the wrinkles of Warham's face. Yet Holbein would not be averse to some adaptation of such realities if the results required it: the faces of both Sir Henry and Lady Guildford were altered between drawing and painting - the latter radically, a smile being changed to a stern countenance. The portrait of the still unidentified Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling (National Gallery, London), underwent a transformation during painting: the pet squirrel on a chain was added, presumably at the lady's request. The brilliant blue background with its pattern of leaves and branches is typically ambiguous, hovering between convincing as sky and outdoor vegetation and deluding as background decoration.

(5) Derek Wilson, Hans Holbein: Portrait of an Unknown Man (1996)

The fascination and significance of Hans Holbein lie in his striving in this tumultuous world to find and speak with his own voice. As a thinking man and an artist he had to grapple with old certainties, new revelations and fashionable scepticisms, not merely for the benefit of his own soul, but so that he might express in his own way a truth that saved the appearance of things. Everything about his tumultuous life - his constant travels, his association with humanist scholars, his Catholic altarpieces, his vituperative Protestant engravings, his making and abandoning of friends, his forsaking of family, his involvement in court intrigue - has to be seen in this context. The age made the man. The man expressed the age.

Fame, like gunpowder, explodes to greatest effect when its three components are mixed in the right proportions. The incandescence of genius flares up only when the individual, the time and the place are correctly amalgamated in the mixing bowl of history. The chemical reaction which produced Holbein's breathtaking paintings, drawings, and engravings resulted from the bringing together of a powerful talent, a time of spiritual upheaval and a Europe in which there was a growing and changing demand for works of art. To understand the phenomenon that was Holhein the Younger we have to see him in relation to the people, ideas and events, involved in the breaking up of western Christendom and the reshaping of European society.

(6) Roy Strong, Holbein: The Complete Paintings (1980)

There is no doubt, however, that Holbein entered royal service by means of the politician who master-minded the machinery and propaganda of the Reformation, Thomas Cromwell,. The latter was acutely aware of the value of visual propaganda for the new regime... Holbein's value would be appreciated by a designer of woodcuts for the publishers and under Cromwell's aegis, he was responsible for the title page to Coverdale's translation of the Bible into English, which was deliberately Protestant and royalist in its subject matter, and a series of anti-clerical woodcuts in which the scribes and pharisees are garbed as monks and clergy.

(7) Tim Marlow, The Daily Mail (28th April, 2012)

A fabulously accomplished painting, which at first sight simply shows a French scholar and a clergyman. However, it’s loaded with clues to its true meaning. You can see celestial and earthly globes, mathematical instruments, a broken lute and much more. The two most brilliant details are almost hidden from view. The first is in the top left corner, where the curtain is open just enough to see a crucifix. The second is the anamorphic skull in the foreground, which only becomes clear when you study the painting at an acute angle. Holbein is showing that in order to grasp the full picture, you need to see things from more than one perspective.

(8) Joan Acocella, The New Yorker (19th October, 2009)

In the Living Hall of the Frick Collection, on either side of a fireplace, there are portraits by Hans Holbein of the two most illustrious politicians of the court of Henry VIII. On the left is Sir Thomas More, Henry’s lord chancellor from 1529 to 1532, who, when the King needed an annulment of his marriage, and therefore a release from the duty of obedience to the Pope, was too good a Catholic to agree to this. For his refusal, he forfeited his office and, eventually, his life. Holbein’s portrait shows him thin and sensitive, with his eyes cast upward, as if awaiting the sainthood that the Church finally bestowed on him, in 1935. On the right side hangs Holbein’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell, the minister who did for Henry what More wouldn’t. He wrote the laws making the King, not the Pope, the head of the English Church, and declaring the English monasteries, with all their wealth, the property of the Crown. To achieve these epochal changes, he had to impose his will on many people, and that is clear in Holbein’s painting. Cromwell is hard and heavy and dressed all in black. His mean little eyes peer forward, as if he were deciding whom to pillory, whom to send to the Tower.

(9) Tom Lubbock, The Independent (9th May, 2008)

Hans Holbein was a memorable icon-maker. He established the image of Henry VIII for all time. His standing portrait of the king has influenced every subsequent picture or impersonation. But it is his other, close-up portrait that has real iconic force. This small and portable head-and-shoulders likeness is no bigger than an A4 sheet. It was, perhaps, made to go abroad on a diplomatic mission. It's constructed not only as a portrait but as a substitute effigy. The monarch is identified with the rectangular panel of oak on which he's depicted. His image is fitted to its shape and flattened to its flatness. He is this painted object.

Holbein's high-definition realism, his inexhaustibly accurate observation, are forced into a rigorously artificial design. The most outrageous trick is the way the whole right-hand edge of the king's face, from eye to chin, is made into a precisely straight, precisely vertical line.

Likewise the top of his shoulders becomes a near horizontal line going right across the picture, making the king's torso beneath it into a sub-rectangle. And this vertical and horizontal intersect in a right angle, which defines the top-right rectangle of the pure ultramarine blue background. The edge of back of the head, behind the ear, also has a straight, upright, run, which meets the jutting-out back of the black hat in another right angle. And there's another horizontal in the straight top edge of the chest-piece.

We're also encouraged to see him as a pattern, laid out on the surface of the wood. His body is an ornamental arrangement, made of distinct pieces of opulent fabric – linen, fur, embroidery, gold cloth. The entire figure, though not quite as flat as a traditional icon, doesn't feel much thicker than a quilt. The flesh of the face is subtly shaded without ever acquiring real volume. The torso swells a little, like a thin cushion.

Likewise, the fur-trimmed hat is just a flat pattern. One of the most beautiful sensations of this picture is the way the king's forehead tucks into the hat's opening like folded paper being slipped into a tight envelope.

Finally there is the tassel of fur that spills off the back of the hat in a rounded, spiralling comma. And with that, the king is locked into his image. He is here before us, present on its wooden surface. We can pick him up, hold him in our hands, look him in the eye, rock him like a baby.

(10) Jonathan Jones, The Guardian (29th January, 2015)

Thomas More and his family were still settling into their new house near the river Thames when they all posed for Holbein. It was a new kind of portrait – an emotional revolution, even. For this Tudor statesman did not just want Holbein to paint him, but to include all his nearest and dearest in what was clearly intended as a companionate image of family life, like nothing hitherto seen in Britain. Women and men all gather together sociably in a little community. On the compositional drawing that survives, More has annotated Holbein’s design. Next to Holbein’s depiction of his wife kneeling, More asks for a change – she should be sitting in a chair, not kneeling like a servant!

(11) Alison Flood, The Guardian (24th January, 2014)

Readers of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies still waiting for the final instalment of Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy will get another glimpse of Henry VIII's wily adviser, as the double Booker-winning author contributes a pen portrait of the chief minister for the National Portrait Gallery.

Inspired by the portrait after Holbein of Cromwell that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, Mantel writes: "In black legend he is a greedy thug, a spymaster, a torturer. But to John Foxe, 'a valiant captain of Christ.' To Archbishop Cranmer, 'such a servant … in wisdom, diligence, faithfulness and experience, as no prince in this realm ever had.'

"He doesn't care what you think of him," writes Mantel in her profile for the National Portrait Gallery. "No man more immune to insult. Truth is the daughter of time. Time is what we haven't got."

(12) Hilary Mantel, The Daily Telegraph (17th October, 2012)

About the year 1533 Hans Holbein painted a portrait of Thomas Cromwell, a lawyer in the service of King Henry VIII. Hans (as he was casually called) was not yet established as Henry’s court painter, but drew his sitters from minor courtiers and the Hanseatic merchant community. He was not seen as a remote genius, more as a jobbing decorator who you would call in to design a tassel, a gold cup, a salt cellar or the scenery for a pageant. Thomas Cromwell had not yet acquired his status as Henry’s chief minister; as the paper on his desk informs us, he was Master of the Jewel House. A gregarious, cosmopolitan man who had spent time in Italy and the Low Countries, he was probably better placed to know Holbein’s worth than many of his courtier contemporaries. The politician and the painter, both due to rise rapidly at Henry’s court, were bound together by a network of shared friends and shared interests.

But the portrait is not a friendly one. Holbein would soon paint The Ambassadors, rich and splendid and symbol-laden, one of the icons of Western art. There are no metaphors in his Cromwell picture. There is no echo of his portrait of Thomas More: none of that swift intelligence, intensity, engagement with the viewer. What you see is what you get. Cromwell looks like a man hard to reach and hard to impress. He does not invite you to conversation. His posture is attentive, though, as if he might be listening to someone or something beyond the frame.

Of course, a Tudor statesman who commissioned his portrait didn’t want to look bonny. He wanted to look powerful; he was the hand, the arm, of the state. Even so, when (in my novel Wolf Hall) the portrait is unveiled, Cromwell himself is taken aback. “I look like a murderer,” he exclaims. His son Gregory says, “Didn’t you know?”

It is as a murderer that Cromwell has come down to posterity: as the man who tricked and slaughtered the saintly Thomas More, the man who ensnared and executed Henry’s second queen, Anne Boleyn; who turned monks out on to the roads, infiltrated spies into every corner of the land, and unleashed terror in the service of the state. If these attributions contain a grain of truth, they also embody a set of lazy assumptions, bundles of prejudice passed from one generation to the next. Novelists and dramatists, who on the whole would rather sensationalise than investigate, have seized on these assumptions to create a reach-me-down villain. Holbein’s portrait is both the source of their characterisation, and a reinforcement of it.

(13) Waldermar Januszczak, Holbein: Eye of the Tudors (24th January, 2015)

Holbein's religious art was in demand. The book trade was keeping him busy and then came the Reformation. Suddenly everything changed. In a Lutheran world there was no longer much demand for Catholic Madonnas... With the religious commissions drying up he needed to find work somewhere else...

Sir Thomas More was the man who famously stood up to Henry, who refused to accept the king as the new head of the church. So Henry had him beheaded. I grew up believing that More was a man of principle. That is why the Catholic Church made him a saint in 1535. But more recently, a new Thomas More has been proposed to us. In today's histories he is often presented as a demented religious bigot. As a cruel slayer of heretics. That is what modern novelists and playwrights have been making of More. But it was not what Holbein makes of him (in his portrait of More) and Holbein was there.

Basel in 1528 was not a nice place to be if you were a painter of a Catholic. Holbein had seen the Protestant revolution arriving in Basel when he left for England. It had got so much worse. Basel officially became a Protestant city in 1529. To celebrate gangs of rabid iconoclast rampaged through the churches looking for Madonnas to trample and smash. On the 9th February 1529, a gang of some 200 angry Lutherans broke into Basel Cathedral and began attacking the art, statures, crucifixes, Holbein's paintings and they did not stop until all their religious idolatry, as they saw it was destroyed...

When I was at school Cromwell was portrayed by everyone as a terrible man. Henry VIII's enforcer, the destroyer of the monasteries, in recent years there has been a big reassessment and the modern image of him, the one you find of him in books, plays, as a decent and brilliant man, trapped in a difficult situation. Cromwell we are now told was an early civil servant who channeled power away from the monarchy and the man who invented the bureaucratic modern state. These days we are encouraged to see Cromwell as a good guy, but in this film I am not going to do that... Holbein's portrait of him (Cromwell).... Just look at him. He has a hard and charmless presence. Those piggy eyes, that blank expression, Cromwell is surely the least attractive sitter in the whole of Holbein's art... Holbein was actually there, who happened to be the greatest portrait painter of his time.

(14) Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse, Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England (2000)

Of all the portraits that Holbein did at the English court, the portrait of Cromwell has always seemed the least flattering to it's subject, the most viciously mocking... Imagine Thomas More, the beautiful saint, and Cromwell, the monster, united in art and history, now facing each other, (through) Holbien and time and chance.

(15) Retha M. Warnicke, Anne of Cleves : Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004-2014)

In March, Nicholas Wotton and Richard Beard began the negotiations at Cleves but were frustrated by the stalling tactics of Wilhelm, who was still attempting to conciliate the emperor. By late summer the ambassadors had achieved success, and Hans Holbein the younger was commissioned to paint a portrait of Anne, which Wotton swore was a faithful representation of her. Many contemporaries, including Wotton, praised her beauty. The first writer to ridicule her as a ‘Flanders mare’ and to insist that Holbein had flattered her was Bishop Gilbert Burnet, writing late in the seventeenth century.

(16) Nicholas Wotton, report to Henry VIII (March, 1539)

She (Anne of Cleves) occupieth her time most with the needle... She can read and write her own language but of French, Latin or other language she hath none... she cannot sing, nor play any instrument, for they take it here in Germany for a rebuke and an occasion of lightness that great ladies should be learned or have any knowledge of music.

(17) Kelly Hart, The Mistresses of Henry VIII (2009)

Henry VIII was fluent in several languages and most European princess could have communicated with him in at least Latin; but Anne only spoke her native German. She also had none of the social skills so prized at the English court: she could not play a musical instrument or sing - she came from a culture that looked down on the lavish celebrations and light-heartedness that were an integral part of King Henry's court. Yet none of this would have mattered if her looks had appealed to the king. It quickly became obvious that they did not.

(18) Alison Weir, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (2007)

Anne smiles out demurely from an ivory frame carved to resemble a Tudor rose. Her complexion is clear, her gaze steady, her face delicately attractive. She wears a head-dress in the Dutch style which conceals her hair, and a gown with a heavily bejewelled bodice. Everything about Anne's portrait proclaimed her dignity, breeding and virtue, and when Henry VIII saw it, he made up his mind at once that this was the woman he wanted to marry.

(19) Helen Langdon, Holbein (1976)

Holbein was placed in an impossible position: dispatched to Düren with orders to produce an instant likeness of Henry VIII's next intended bride, he needed to exercise diplomacy and tact... As it is, Anne's dress seems to have fascinated him more than the strangely lifeless symmetry of her features. Henry's displeasure at finding Anne of Cleves more like a "fat flanders mare" when she arrived for the marriage ceremony in January 1540 cost Holbein dear in prestige, and he received no further important work from this quarter.

(20) Derek Wilson, Hans Holbein: Portrait of an Unknown Man (1996)

Anne of Cleves... was pleasant, talentless, naive, lumpy... homely perhaps, but certainly not pretty... How was he (Holbein) to represent this truth in paint? Simplicity had been the appropriate technique with the Duchess of Milan. Holbein had deliberately concentrated attention on the face and hands; had let the girl's beauty speak for itself. With Anne of Cleves... exactly the opposite was called for. Holbein would not, dared not, improve on nature. All he could do was attract attention away from the features by making the most of jewellery, elaborate court dress and gem-studded hair-covering...

Holbein employed tempera on parchment, which he glued on to canvas when he reached London... If ever the artist was nervous about the reception of a portrait he must have been particularly anxious about this one... He had to do what he could to sound a note of caution. That meant that he was obliged to express his doubts in the painting. If we study the portrait of Anne of Cleves we are struck by an oddity of composition. This is the most "square-on" portrait Holbein ever painted. Everything in it is perfectly balanced: it might almost be a study in symmetry - except for the jewelled bands on Anne's skirt. The one on her left is not complemented by another on the right. Furthermore, her right hand and the fall of her left under-sleeve draw attention to the discrepancy. This sends a signal to the viewer that, despite the elaborateness of the costume, there is something amiss, a certain clumsiness... Holbein intended giving the broadest hint he dared to the king. Henry would not ask his opinion about his intended bride, and the painter certainly could not venture it. Therefore he communicated unpalatable truth through his art. He could do no more.

(21) David Starkey, Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII (2003)

Holbein, contrary to legend, does not appear to have flattered Anne. Instead, his painting and Wotton's pen-portrait are all of a piece. Both highlight the woman's gentle, passive character... But, in any case, by this point Henry was almost beyond putting off. For he had fallen in love, not as previously with a face, but with an idea. And his feelings were fed, not with images, but with words. All over the summer, Cromwell and his agents had told him that Anne - the beautiful, the gentle, the good and the kind - was the woman for him. Finally he had come to believe them. Only a sight of the woman herself might break the spell.

(22) Antonia Fraser, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1992)

Sir Anthony Browne said that from the moment he (Henry VIII) set eyes on the Lady Anna, he was immediately struck with dismay... The important comment was that made by the King to Cromwell after he left the Lady Anna. "I like her not", said Henry VIII.

The question must now be raised as to what the King saw, compared to what he had expected to see: was there a deception and if so by whom? There are after all a number of candidates, not only Holbein, but the English agents and envoys abroad. Let us take the actual appearance of Anna of Cleves first: for this we are fortunate in having a first-hand description, written only a few days later by the French ambassador, Charles de Marillac, who was not prejudiced in either direction, towards her beauty or her ugliness. Anna of Cleves looked about thirty, he wrote (she was in fact twenty-four), tall and thin, "of middling beauty, with a determined and resolute countenance." The Lady was not as handsome as people had affirmed she was, nor as young (he was of course wrong about that), but there was a "steadiness of purpose in her face to counteract her want of beauty". This in turn seems to fit well with Christopher Mont's careful reference to the "gravity in her face" which went so well with her natural modesty.

The "daughter of Cleves" was solemn, or at any rate by English standards she was, and she looked old for her age. She was solemn because she had not been trained to be anything else and the German fashions did little to give an impression of youthful charm in a court in love as ever with things French, or at any rate associating them with fun and delight. Although Henry VIII never actually "swore they had brought over a Flanders mare to him", the apocryphal story does sum up, as apocryphal stories often do, the profound cultural gap between the two courts of Cleves and England. Turning to Holbein's picture, one finds this solemnity well captured: a critic might indeed term it stolidity. Besides Nicholas Wotton, in his report, had confirmed that Holbein, generally regarded as the master of the "lively" or lifelike (not the flattering) in his own time, had indeed captured Anna's "image" very well.

Of course a beautiful young woman, however stolid or badly dressed, would still have been acceptable. Anna of Cleves was not beautiful, and those reports which declared she was were egregious exaggerations in the interests of diplomats - to this extent, the envoys are the real culprits, not the painter. But was Anna of Cleves actually hideous? Holbein, painting her full-face, as was the custom, does not make her so to the modem eye, with her high forehead, wide-apart, heavy-lidded eyes and pointed chin. There is indirect evidence that Anna of Cleves was perfectly pleasant looking from the later years of Henry VIII. When Chapuys reported Anna of Cleves as rating her contemporary, Catherine Parr, "not nearly as beautiful" as herself, this expert observer did not choose to contradict her so that the boast was presumably true, or at least true enough not to be ridiculous...

Then there is the question of Anna of Cleves' complexion. It may be that this was a problem: her own officials' protests about the damage to be done by a long sea voyage may have been a tactful way of handling it. When the King roared at his courtiers that he had been misinformed - by them amongst others, since they had seen her at Calais - the only explanation which could be stammered out was that her skin was indeed rather more "brown" than had been expected... the contemporary ideal was to be "pure white".

Even allowing for all this we are still left with something mysterious in the whole episode, and the sheer immediacy of the King's disappointment (followed by his indignation - which was, however, never directed at Holbein). The explanation must therefore lie in something equally mysterious, the nature of erotic attraction. The King had been expecting a lovely young bride, and the delay had merely contributed to his desire. He saw someone who, to put it crudely, aroused in him no erotic excitement whatsoever. And more intimate embraces lay ahead: or were planned to do so.