Hans Holbein the Younger: ‘A man very excellent in taking of physionamies’ - Dr Susan Foister

so here is the man himself a self-portrait made we think towards the end of his life which is today in the Uffizi in Florence but wind back a few years towards the end of 1526 a 28 year old German immigrant named Hans Holbein the younger arrived in London he was born in albs burg and he had spent the previous decade establishing a very successful career as a painter and a designer in Basel in Switzerland but now in the words of his friend and patron Erasmus who you see lower-right in a wonderful portrait made in 1523 which is on loan to the National Gallery in residences words of that year the arts were freezing the Reformation was already affecting the livelihood of artists in Germany and he was seeking work in England in London in December Erasmus his English correspondent Sir Thomas More who you see in the portrait on the left now in the Frick Collection Thomas More was gloomy about Hall Bynes chances I'm afraid he will not find England as fruitful and fertile ground as he had hoped he wrote but he promised to do what he could to help so we can imagine Holbein as he crossed the English Channel from Antwerp where he stayed on his journey wondering about how he would manage life in London how would he deal with negotiations in English where would he find working premises how would he buy his materials and what was available in England and in London with whom would he be able to forge useful working alliances and what would the competition be like and I hope to give you some answers to at least some of these questions now London the most populated part of London in the 16th century was of course the city where we are now on which you can see here on the upper right of the of the map here which is the brown and Hogan burg famous map of 1572 on the far left going round the river is Westminster where in the following decade in the 1530s Henry Gates would focus on the magnificence of his Palace of Whitehall to which Holbein would make a significant contribution as we'll see and out of the picture to the right furthered um the Thames was Greenwich palace where Holbein was to make his impressive court debut in 1527 as we'll see in a moment but foreign artists and craftspeople had for long settled in London I'm showing you here a portrait of the Venetian diplomat and future Doge Marco Barber ego this was painted when he resided in London from the mid 14 forties to at least 1450 and that's what the letter that he's holding which you can see enlarged on the right demonstrates he's actually in London but this portrait also provides a concrete example of the work of a painter working in London who was clearly trained in the Netherlanders tradition we don't know whether he came over from the Low Countries to London or whether he was part of a family that had settled there but the art of making lifelike portraiture as we shall see is a skill which those from abroad may have been better qualified to supply the native London artists now the guilds in London were fiercely protective of their native members opportunities in 1492 the audience's of the painters company of the City of London laid down that no one should employ a painter from outside the city if they could get a Freeman of the city for the same price and in 1517 there were riots in protest against foreign workers including artists and especially glazes from the Low Countries so those from outside London and from Europe tended to live on the margins of the city Westminster was very popular because of the ecclesiastical work on offer before the Reformation and many German speaking Goldsmith's settled there so that of might have been quite an attractive option for Holbein and Southwark over the river was another location very popular with immigrants including painters Holbein though it's documented in 1541 living in the parish of st. Andrew Undershaft in all gate ward and you can see that top right in the map there this is a map which sets out the locations of many painters living in London in the 16th century both English and from abroad and you can see that Holbein is right over there in Aldgate and John Brown an English painter who are be mentioning in a moment is over there towards the left so there were artists from abroad who did settle in the area of the city but many more settled on the margins over the river and at Westminster so in 1541 we know that Holbein was living here in sant andrew Undershaft and in that same year he did become an english denison or resident and it was war with france that forced alien residents to choose between denizen ship or expulsion and over many years Holbein had maintained a sort of balancing act between basel and london hanging onto his Basel citizenship but also with a very increasingly strong footing in London but hope I need not have worried about his future prospects in London in just over two months time from this exchange of letters between Erasmus and more by February of 1527 he was at work on the site of Henry the eighth's Palace at Greenwich and at the rate of four shillings a day he was by far the best pace paid artist or craftsman involved in the preparations there which were for the entertainment of an embassy from France in May of that year and Holbein was one of several European artists working there alongside a large team of English painters and very usefully the accounts very full accounts survived for this project in which we can identify payment to Holbein as masterhands following that large letter P in the upper line of the slide so he got four shillings a day and with the other painters they were engaged in the preparation of two linked spaces on the site a temporary banqueting house and a temporary theater or disguising house in the account books we can also find records of all the materials used as well as the payments to the workers and the records of the materials show that Holbein would have been very familiar with those pigments and materials that were being used on-site at Greenwich though he would have had no difficulty there and there's a similar record for the theatre which tells us precisely which painters and craftsmen were at work on any day between January and early May 1527 now the main focus of work in the banqueting house was the triumphal arch or screen which was decorated with gilded heads of Roman emperors which was supplied which were supplied by the Italian artist Giovanni de Maya no but on its reverse the arch featured a painting this was supplied by master hands for the large son of four pounds and it represented on canvas the Battle of Terra Juan in which the English defeated the French in 1513 so Henry the 8th amused himself if not his French guests by revealing this highly undiplomatic scene as they pass through the arch on their way to the theatre after dinner and the painting may have been similar to this now at Basel which you see on the lower left of the screen this is a battle scene and we don't know its original purpose but it may suggest what the scene that Holbein painted was like now the theater was dominated by its painted ceiling and that may perhaps have resembled this woodcut map of the world by Holbein which you see above which was made for a publication by Sebastian Munster in 1532 and the woodcut was possibly even inspired by Holbein's painting as described in halls chronicle of the reign of Henry the eighth it showed the earth and sea the zodiac the five girdles around the earth and the two poles all appearing by a cunning making of another cloth as well as the planetary deities in their houses so there was perhaps quite a complex arrangement of a semi-transparent or transparent cloth over another one on the ceiling and for this Holbein was paid four shillings a day for working with the Royal astronomer Nicolaus Kratzer and a group of other painters and here we can see the payment on the screen it's remarkable that Hall binds talents were recognized so swiftly that he was given a major role at the court within such a short time of his arrival in London how did this propitious start to this German immigrants career occur England was not in fact the first country Hall by had tried in 1524 he'd traveled to France and reached lawar but then returned to Basel but his chances of success at Henry the eighth's court must have seemed substantial not only was he an immensely skillful painter but his design skills were formidable in augsburg he had probably trained by collaborating with sculptors and metal workers like his father and at Greenwich there were German metal workers at the Armory's there as well as guilders who worked on the roof of the theater in Basel hauled by had designed wood cuts for the burgeoning printing industry such as the one we've just seen as well as stained glass he was a master of working on different scales and had enormous powers of invention using perspective and the novel Renaissance decorative motifs which were conquering Northern Europe such skills were eminently adaptable to different environments and especially to that of the court where the need for prestigious imagery and artifacts for court ceremonies court buildings and diplomatic exchange was constant particulars particularly since as a Greenwich much was ephemeral produced only to be thrown out to make way for the next grand occasion but Holbein also had exceptional skills as a portraitist as well as powerful contacts as we've seen via Erasmus these these men were likely to have provided introductions to those overseeing the Greenwich festivities rather perhaps than Holbein taking the route of going through fellow german-speaking craftsmen and portraits and further opportunities came out of the months he spent there this portrait on the left of the Kings German astronomer Nicolaus Kratzer for example which was painted in 1528 and is now in the Louvre cracks as English was never supposed to have been up to very much one can imagine Holbein and Kratzer speaking in German together Holbein must have quickly had to acquire some english skills so the portrait shows him at work on creating astronomical instruments and Kratzer began an association with Holbein at Greenwich which lasted until the painters death in 1543 their first collaboration you can see in the middle of this slide it was a manuscript made as a New Year's gift for King Henry the eighth's in 1529 Holbein provided the illuminated letters you can see the letter either and this was in fact an instruction book to inform Henry of how to use an astronomical instrument which accompanied it their very last collaboration was on this clock salt you can see the drawing on the right which was designed by Holbein for Sir Anthony Denny a court here to present to Henry the 8th as a New Year's gift in 1544 but the inscription there is in Crassus hand so he must have been involved in designing it as well we don't know the name of the maker but it would have required a highly skilled metalworker perhaps from northern Europe and it's probable that Kratzer himself had formed links with German Goldsmith's for the creation of such items which would also have been great use to further Holbein in his career at court another page from the Greenwich accounts this shows us how a Greenwich Holbein worked alongside English painters who were members of the painters dana's Company of London they also worked constantly at court on large decorative projects as well as routine maintenance the Greenwich documents list the teams of company painters in regular order with their payment the most highly paid and most important first and these painters were led by John Brown the King's painter and head of the London painters Lena's company he was responsible for much of the supply of decorative and heraldic painting for use in courts ceremonial and at war in the first quarter of the 16th century from Flags for the ship the great Harry and others for standards for the army sent to France in 1523 and for cloths painted with antique work for an earlier court entertainment in 1524 now the fact that the head of the company was responsible for carrying out painting for the King meant that the company's men constantly benefited from lucrative court work a privilege to be strongly defended against foreign incursions and during Henry the it's rain there was a constant stream of work to be carried out especially in the 1530s on palaces including Whitehall and Hampton Court but this work was largely decorative Holbein could provide more those who were employed by the king wore a livery embroidered with the initials H R you can see the man on the Left wearing such a livery we don't know who the sitters in these small portraits are or even whether the man on the left was an artist lots of suggestions have been made but none validated and we don't even know if Holbein himself was required to wear such a livery but we do know that by 1532 he was back in London after spending a further four years in Basel and by 1536 he was referred to as Henry the eighth's painter but as we'll see in a moment he was working for the king even before that date the first salary payments of 30 pounds a year survived only from 1537 but it's likely that Holbein had a salary from before then there's unfortunately no document that survives to tell us what the tasks were that the King demanded from Holbein but it's likely that Holbein was valued both for his abilities as a designer and as a portraitist crucially a remit very different from that of John Brown and his English successors on his return to England Holbein was greatly in demand the German Hanseatic merchants employed him both as a portraitist and as a decorative artist you can see on the left this very well-preserved portrait of the Hanseatic merchant Herman vaidic dated 1530 - so important Peters piece of evidence to show Holbein walls already back in England then shows him seated at a desk a vivid blue background behind him and gilded lettering giving the year his age his 29th and in this way the portrait proclaims its status as a work of art by Holbein as well as an imitation of reality and the likeness of Hermann the German merchants also employed Holbein to decorate their Hall the steel yard on the site of what is now Cannon Street Station they employed him to make decorative paintings on canvas which are now lost they were destroyed in the 18th century which represented very appropriately for the merchants the triumphs of riches and of poverty so the idea really was the Wheel of Fortune turns from rich to poverty and back again and on the right hand side you can see a copy made in the 17th century of the triumph of poverty by lucas forstman so as I mentioned very soon after his return to England it appears that Holbein was already working for Henry the eighth's and one proof of this is this design for a table fountain for the King to give to amberlynn at New Year 1534 and they were of course married the previous year in 1533 and on this design are an Valens coat of arms you can see in the middle tier of the of the drawing very few pieces of this type survive which were once owned by Henry the eighth's but in a slide on the right you can see a rare survival Henry the eighth's clock salt which gives an idea of the magnificence and the fashion ability of the Renaissance style designs in which Holbein excelled he didn't design this clock salt but it shows you the kind of work which is represented by the design on the left now in Hall Pines native Alps Berg the skills of the artists designer whose work was then produced by stained glass makers Goldsmith's and sculptures was paramount and these skills could be exploited extremely well rulers distinctive invention was a mark of real prestige going beyond the mere distinction offered by heraldry it Mesa it may therefore have been as important for Holbein to create these designs for royal Goldsmith's work as to produce portraits in fact very few portraits survived which we can be certain that Holbein produced for Henry the eighth this exquisite small portrait of Henry now in the Chasen Museum in Madrid may have been intended as a diplomatic gift perhaps for the King of France it's the kind of portrait that Frances the first of France had made so Henry may have wanted to send him one in return we simply don't know it's not mentioned in the inventories of Henry's collection which perhaps suggests that it was made to be not to be kept but to be given away and it shows Henry wearing this absolutely magnificent cloth of silver cloth of gold all jeweled more jewels on his hat above this portrait on the left of the infant Prince Edward was given by Hall bind himself to Henry as a New Year's gift in 1539 it shows him with a rattle rather than the royal orb of majesty and below with lines in Latin which were composed by the humanist political writer Richard Morrison to flatter the child's royal father so it was another kind of collaboration and next to it on the right you can see another image of Edward very very small drawing Edward with his pet dog surrounded by acorns so out of the small Akins would would grow the mighty oak so again a reference to the power of his father and this seems to have been produced as a decorative design for our medal or perhaps as an engraving or precious stone two drawings of Sir Thomas Eliot and his wife Margaret who you see here remind us of how difficult it was to obtain portraits made from sittings with an artist in England before Holbein's arrival Sir Thomas Eliot wrote in his book named the governor in 1531 if we will have anything well painted carved or embroidered we are constrained to resort unto strangers and urged the immediate apprenticeship of all talented native English boys this beautiful drawing probably dates from within a couple of years of this statement its characteristic of those associated with Holbein second visit to London in the 1530s the face and the upper part of the body are sketched in colored chalks on paper which has been covered in a flesh-colored preparation perhaps one of a range of tinted papers which hope I'm prepared in advance so that the choice of a particular pink could be calibrated to his observation of the subjects complexion when they arrived in his presence the details of the head are sparingly reinforced in black ink using the pen and brush to suggest differences between the growth of eyebrows the stubble and the rather lank hair under the cap whole vines arrival in London for the second time affected a transformation in a very short period if native talent was not being harvested at least large numbers of courtiers such as Eliot were now acquiring painted images of themselves of extraordinary quality where none had existed before no painted images survived made after these drawings but we can be fairly certain that there would have been painted images in an age when looking in a mirror and seeing an undistorted self-image was not an everyday experience the effect of owning such a portrait must have been astounding Holbein sitters in the holders of the great Offices of state members of the Privy Council in the royal household the peers of England and their wives sons and daughters in fact hope I'm portrayed around a quarter of the peerage or their families a very substantial proportion when it's considered that many did not come to court because they were too old too impoverished or disliked the rapid political changes of the time nearly 100 preparatory drawings for painted portraits survived dating from the two periods when hope I've worked in England 15:26 to 8 and 15 32 to 43 the vast majority are in the royal collection of Windsor Castle and most of these portrait drawings are named and although the inscriptions as we see here are not contemporary we know from a 16th century inventory of the drawings that the original identifications were made not long after Hall Bynes death and many can be corroborated in other ways in this painted portrait of 1536 of Sir Richard shovel he wears a chain of knighthood which is roughly sketched in the preparatory drawing for it and just see around his shoulders there in his will Savile who died in 1564 refers to the chain of gold which I myself was wont to wear in folds about my neck so it was obviously an important possession the half-length portrait is apparently simple and restrained the focus on the face but the cast shadow behind on the left and the inscription suggesting as we saw in the portrait of the Hanseatic merchant vaidic that the painting provides a richly deceptive illusion one which calls attention to the artists skill in making it in the drawing for the portrait there is unusually an inscription you can see it running vertically noting that the eyes of the sitter were a little yellowish it's also unusual that hole includes the inscription see in the background of the painting but he rarely does so in the portrait drawings and then finally we can note on the left of Seville's neck there's a carefully deceptive drawing of a scar which was exactly translated into the finished painted portrait most importantly the drawing of the head can be shown to be exactly the same size as the painting so we can do deduce from this and other similar examples that tracing was used by Holbein to transfer the likenesses from drawing to panel probably using carbon coated paper between the two so he made a sort of sandwich of the drawing on top carbon cake coated paper in the middle and then the panel underneath and he would trace from the drawing with a stylus you don't need very much pressure for the outline to come through here you can see on the left the portrait drawing that was used to produce the portrait of the elderly rather weary seeming Archbishop of Canterbury William Wareham in 1527 a painted portrait on the right which was made to be sent to the Archbishop's patron Erasmus in Basel and one which was modeled closely on the image in turn that hole by made of Erasmus in 1523 and sent to him which we saw at a start you can see how closely the composition has been transferred from one to the other the crucifix in the portrait of Wareham being placed where the Renaissance canister is in the portrait of Erasmus and then the books replaced by the mitre on the right hand side again the head in the drawing is exactly the same size as that in the painting because the slides make them look rather different but in reality they are the same what is notable here also is that this drawing is made with colored chalks on off-white paper and it's somewhat larger than the brings on the pink primed paper that whole diamonds to make on his second visit to London which we saw example just now this miniature portrait it's really really very tiny you can hold it in your hand it's enormous ly enlarged here this probably represents the wife of one of those most successful in the tudor courtiers game of power and personal enrichment Sir Thomas oddly the Lord Chancellor one of the beneficiaries of the wealth from the dissolution of the monasteries who married in 1538 as his second wife Elizabeth grey in the drawing of Lady orde-lees metal point is used to describe the jewels you can just see that's that fainter outline there the lower part of the drawing while Holbein uses ink to outline her features and then there are notes indicating that she's to be dressed in red damask with Velvets sleeves as she is in the portrait miniature but there could also perhaps have been a full-size painted portrait which doesn't survive we don't know we have only one glimpse of Holbein at work provided by contemporary documents which indicate clearly that he worked initially from sittings from the life in the presence of the sitter this occurs in March 15 38 when Holbein described on this occasion as a man very excellent in taking of physiognomy 'he's had been sent to Brussels by Henry the eighth's to take the likeness of Christina of Denmark the 16 year old widowed Duchess of Milan and you see here the finished portrait today in the National Gallery but would Holbein have taken such a large panel it's a pretty much life-size portrait with him over the inner boat in the English Channel over to Brussels it seems unlikely his sitting with Christina lasted three hours long enough probably to make several drawings none of which survived but not long enough to paint a full-size picture in oils but the immediate result when he returned we're told was very perfect and evidently delighted Henry so much that whatever he saw the likeness pleased him so much that since he saw it he has been in much better humour than he ever was making musicians play on the instruments all day long we must presume then that Holbein worked up the painting from whatever he brought back a drawing of the head possibly a study of the costume and perhaps on this occasion a sketch of the hands for the hands are particularly beautifully portrayed and Christina was said indeed to have beautiful hands there may also have been studies of her black mourning dress perhaps like this one in the British Museum which shows the front and back of a woman's dress all by may also have wanted to recall the textiles from which her clothing was made here the black satin which he paints so effectively in the portrait so he may have made annotations such as those that we see here in this drawing of an unknown man I think you can see in the lower part of the drawing that there are notations and they're not here color notations they are notes to show that this the texture the silk and the satin of his dress so those are the kinds of notes that hole by might have made in respect of Christina's dress and they would certainly have been a drawing of her face which was all important for Henry in the choice of a bride it was reported that Christina had dimples which were evident when she smiled there is none in these parts of personage beauty and birth like under the Duchess of Milan she is not so pure white as was the late Queen whose soul got pardon and that's Jane Seymour but she has a singular good countenance and when she chances to smile there appeareth to it's in her cheeks and one in her chin the which becometh her right excellently well christina was said to have resembled a certain mistress Shelton who may be the woman in the drawing on the left but the drawing that Holbein made was probably more like that you see on the right of Lady Parker which again is a frontal representation I want to look a little bit more into the ways in which Holbein created his portrait compositions and this portrait of a woman who is almost certainly an Louisville today in the National Gallery was evidently made for her husband Sir Francis perhaps around the time she gave birth to their son and heir was made on Hall Bynes first visit to England between 15 26 and 15 28 on her lap is a squirrel the Louisville emblem which you see here in the stained glass there right and at her shoulder a starling perhaps a pun on the location of their norfolk seat in East Harlem you have to say that quite quickly I'm told in a Norfolk accent no drawings for this portrait survived but one way of finding out a good deal about how Holbein used his drawings to make painted portraits is with the aid of infrared reflectography such as the one you see here with the aid of infrared reflectography we can look through the surface paint of the portrait of Anne Lovell and see some slight but beautifully fluid brush drawing delineating folds in the in her shawl which were not always followed in the surface painting I hope you can see those on the shoulder and also the beautiful way that the folds at the bottom of the show are depicted but crucially there is no visible drawing in the contours of her face which must have been traced from a drawing now lost just minor alterations were made in the course of painting to her hairline and to the contour of her cap so we can see here a clear distinction between the lack of alterations to the face and the major alterations Holbein felt free to make to the rest of the picture in fact the background the presence of both the squirrel and the Starling and even the position of the sitters hands which were moved considerably with the result of later decisions perhaps sometime after the initial sketch for the head but the portrait drawings were vital in the neighboring Holbein to transfer with precision to the painted likeness the exact likeness he had produced during the sitting the controller of the royal household and master of the Revels sir Henry Guildford who you see on the Left had overall charge of the festivities at Greenwich and ultimate responsibility for employing Holbein there in 1527 on that first visit to London as we saw and Holbein showed him in the same year along with his wife in the portrait on the right resplendent in costly gold damask and wearing the collar of the Order of the Garter in Lady Guilford's portrait on the right her evidently smaller figure is balanced with a highly elegant and fashionable release Renaissance : not dissimilar to the one we saw in the portrait of Erasmus owned by Archbishop Wareham the decorations an architectural framework of the entertainment halls at Greenwich were all in this highly fashionable antique work style and the bulky richly dressed figure of the powerful Sir Henry already sends a signal of how Holbein will create his iconic portrait of Henry the eighth and possibly alerted the King to the exceptional powers of the artist he would shortly lose for four years now a preparatory drawing for Guilford's portrait also survives but interestingly the correspondence between the outlines of painting and drawing it's not so exact here the face of the painting has been elongated perhaps in order to flatter slightly the bulky figure that Guilford presented and I think you can just about see that by comparing the two on the screen but here we can see that infrared reflectography also reveals some alterations to the proportions of Guilford's face during the process of working up the painting and it's probable that Holbein corrected the portrait by eye as he worked you can see here on the right the drawing the painting and the infrared all superimposed and slightly different levels for the mouth the top of his doublet and the position of the eyes so Holbein perhaps slightly moved his drawing and tracing up and down the panel to slim the face and in the case of lady Guilford this drawing you see on the left of a half smiling lady Guilford was once thought to have been discarded before hope I made the finished painting from a second lost drawing but we know we now know that this is not the case the outlines of the painting and the drawing correspond precisely and it's clear from studying the under drawing that the features of Lady Guilford were merely moved around her face and has smile removed to be replaced by an expression of solemnity for the painted portrait it's also notable that she's holding a small devotional book it was just such a combination of imaginative and technical skills that were at work in the creation of the image of Henry the eighth's the famous frontal full-length image so in 1537 Holbein produced his masterpiece in painting for the King the Whitehall wall painting which was burned down along with the palace in 1698 and I'm showing you here the small copy made for charles ii in the 17th century the original mural was made for the privy chamber a semi-private room in which the King would receive the most illustrious of guests and would impress them with this life-size image of the Tudor dynasty Henry viii and his father Henry the seventh with their wives Elizabeth of York and Henry's third wife Jane Seymour who bore his son the future Edward the sixth the tablet between them is inscribed with Latin verses which ask which King is the greater the father who reconciled the warring Kingdom in the Wars of the Roses or the son who brought about the break with papal Rome and established the English church only one drawing survives for this commission the cartoon for the left-hand part of the Whitehall wall painting today in the National Portrait Gallery this is of course a different kind of working drawing to those we've seen so far it served as the final preparatory stage for a much larger painting than the smaller portraits on a different surface and it was used in a different way here the outlines were pricked and charcoal dust was shaken through the holes onto the surface behind when the cartoon was removed the outlines made by the dust could be reinforced and painting begun and if you go to see this at the portrait gallery you can still see those tiny pinprick holes but there is one very important difference between the cartoon image and the famous image of the finished painting the position of the heads in 3/4 facing the cartoon and full face in the painting the cartoon is actually made up of several pieces of paper joined together and the figures themselves are cutouts stuck down onto the background presumably they could be more easily positioned in this way moved around and then stuck down in their final agreed attitudes and the head of the cartoon is also a separate piece of paper so the outlines of the head in three-quarter face must have been transferred to the wall but only at this point was the decision taken to turn the head to face us a frontal view Holbein had already used in earlier portraits it would be a relatively simple matter for Holbein to alter the contour of the head slightly slip the features around Henry's face and maneuvered them to the front for posterity here we see Jane Seymour in the copy of the Whitehall painting in a portrait now of Vienna and in a drawing on the right here she is wearing a dress with pleated linen under sleeves and pearls and a pendant jewel around her neck but in the full-length portrait of the Queen and the lost Whitehall painting and she in which he represents of course the only Tudor Queen to have born a living son of Henry's generation she wears far grander jewelry and clothes though her pose is exactly the same there her gown is of cloth of gold her sleeves of omen and she wears masked gold chains across her bodice and in the portrait at Vienna which is exactly the same size as the drawing on the right her ensemble is different again her under Steve's of looped gold brocade her over sleeves of gold net over red velvet and here she has more elaborate pearls and precious stones in her necklace which match her headdress these different parts of her costume would in life have been assembled and pinned on separately so it was quite a simple matter for sleeves and jewels to be upgraded from the drawing to the more sumptuous textiles of the portrait and the greater grandeur of the wall painting the Queen's presence once the drawing was made was not required and indeed we can't be certain that she was still alive when the wall painting was completed in 1537 the extent to which large-scale compositions called for such maneuvers can be seen again in Bynes portrait of a family of Sir Thomas More or at least in the studies for it for the painting itself which was on fine linen canvas was destroyed in the 18th century you can see on the left whole Bynes annotated working drawing probably into mediate stage at which Holbein had settled on the overall composition but needed to discuss it further with more who had commissioned it on the right you can see the copy at nostril Prairie of the finished painting which differs in a number of respects did Holbein need to have the whole family sitting before him to draw them when they were apparently at their family prayers there's very good evidence that he did not there are several studies for the portrait this is the wonderfully bold chalk study of John Moore which shows him very much as he appears in the group but in the group Albin has removed his hat and then this drawing of an Kritika gives the game away completely because she's clearly seated on a chair which you can see at the left we go back to the group you can see she's standing in the middle so hope I might take the appearances of his sitters from the life but their poses and indeed the composition of a large painting such as this might be quite imaginary like other artists Holbein may not have felt obliged to use the sitters themselves for models when trying to work out how they should look at full-length in fact a great deal could be added or assembled or altered later as we've now seen jewelry and costumes certainly but also bodies even hands and certainly backgrounds virtually all Holbein surviving portraits studies show only the upper part of the sitters bodies and often only heads and shoulders very few include hands and hardly any have indications of background but it's clear although most drawings have been slightly cut down it's clear that the head is the principal focus and it's this switch Holbein worked up in the sitter's presence in the very first stage of the encounter between sitter and artist lastly in 1533 Holbein painted one of the most extraordinary works of his career this double full-length portrait of jean de domville and his friend george de selve jean to dance here on the left and shows herself in the right and this of course hangs today in the National Gallery Danville was the French ambassador to London in 1533 Board was waiting for the coronation of Anne Boleyn and then for the birth of her child the future Elizabeth the first the self was his good friend on a short secret mission probably from April to June that year which cheered him immensely this painting commemorated the visit and their friendship and it was destined for Danville's chateau in France policy the painting pivots between the distorted shape of the skull in the center which clicks into shape if the viewer stands on the right and the half-hidden image of the crucifix top left the hope of resurrection between the two men is an array of astronomical instruments and objects earthly utility especially notable are the lute with its broken string and the Lutheran hymn book next to the self his attempts to reconcile the deep divisions in Christendom between Catholics and Lutheran's may have inspired their presence the two diplomats look uncannily as though they are posing for the camera but such a large composition for which unfortunately no drawings at all survived could hardly be realized without an immense amount of work in constructing it can we really believe that the two men posed at the same time in a room just like this and with a piece of furniture loaded with Globes musical instruments and astronomical instruments arranged between them were any of these objects even their own possessions even that seems unlikely the instruments were almost certainly owned by Hall bynes friend the Kings astronomer Nicolaus Kratzer in this portrait we saw earlier of 1528 here he's actually making one these instruments and hope I may well have kept detailed drawings to use again the terrestrial globe appears to be based on real globe perhaps again one belonging to Kratzer but here Holbein has edited the original and inscribed on the map of France not only the area in which John didn't feel resided but also policy the location of the chateau and the destination of the painting there's a detail of the globe and here is the detail of the lute with its broken string suggesting dissonance in Christendom and here the skull as you see it if you stand on the right of the painting in the National Gallery and there a detail of the crucifix the whole composition was surely inspired by whole vines woodcut for the dance of death a series of small exquisitely designed narratives of the ways in which death carries off those in the midst of life when they were least expecting it here in the final woodcut at the end of the book a man and woman stand to either side of a shield with the decaying deaths head and above bony arms reaching up to bring down a rock to smash an hourglass a device for measuring time painting and woodcut demonstrate the extraordinary abilities Holbein brought to London as an artist as a designer and as a man who could capture likeness they also remind us that his career was cut short in the autumn of 1543 when he died suddenly probably from the plague which was then raging in London thank you you

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Rating: 4.9148936 out of 5

Keywords: Hans Holbein the Younger, Hans Holbein, holbein, portrait, henry viii, greenwich, Marco Barbarigo, netherlands, Nikolaus Kratzer, King’s Painter, Painter-Stainers Company, whitehall, Hampton Court, anne boleyn, infant Edward, Sir Thomas Elyot, Margaret, Sir Richard Southwell, Sir Thomas Audley, Christina of Denmark, Duches off Myllayn, Duchess of Milan, Sir Henry Guildford, Lady Guildford, Infrared, Whitehall wall painting, Masterpiece, Charles II, Tudor dynasty

Id: 3UnbWlZnYv4

Length: 51min 4sec (3064 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 23 2016