Hans Holbein d.y.
The master of the portrait at the court of Henry VIII.
Hans Holbein the Younger came from Augsburg and became court painter in England. His portraits are precise, and in The Ambassadors a distorted skull lies hidden.
Hans Holbein the Younger was born around 1497–98 in Augsburg. His father, Hans Holbein the Elder, was a well-known painter, and the son learned the trade in his workshop. Around 1515 he moved to Basel in Switzerland, a city with many printers and humanists. There he made early marginal drawings in a copy of Erasmus of Rotterdam’s In Praise of Folly and woodcuts for the printers, among them a famous series on the Dance of Death.
In Basel he painted The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb of 1521–22, now in the Kunstmuseum Basel. It is a long, narrow panel in which the dead man lies with visible signs of decay, without a trace of idealisation. The Russian writer Dostoevsky wrote that one could lose one’s faith from looking at it. Holbein also painted several portraits of Erasmus. But the Reformation in Basel led to iconoclasm, and demand for religious art vanished.
With a letter of recommendation from Erasmus he travelled to England and Thomas More in 1526. After a few more years in Basel he returned to London in 1532 and stayed there for the rest of his life. Among his best-known works is The Ambassadors of 1533 in the National Gallery in London. Two French envoys stand among scientific instruments, and on the floor lies a distorted shape that turns out to be a skull when seen obliquely from the side. Such a distorted motif is called an anamorphosis.
From the mid-1530s he was court painter to Henry VIII. He created the image of the king, legs apart and powerful, that we still have. The large wall painting in Whitehall was destroyed by fire in 1698, but parts of the preparatory work survive. He also portrayed several of the king’s future wives, among them Anne of Cleves. Holbein’s portraits are precise, with a keen eye for fabric, jewellery and facial features, yet at the same time quiet and reserved. His wife and children stayed on in Basel. He died in London in 1543, probably of the plague.
Holbein is regarded as one of the greatest portrait painters in history. His images of the Tudor court have shaped our idea of an entire era.