Hans Holbein's 'Christina of Denmark' | The History of the National Gallery in Six Paintings

good afternoon everybody my name's Susan foster and I'd like to welcome you to this talk which is on hole binds great portrait of Christina of Denmark so we're going to spend the next half hour exploring how this painting came to be made by hands Holbein one of the most famous artists of the Renaissance and there's there's also quite an exciting coda about how this painting came to be in the National Gallery's collection today so Christina of Denmark who was she well we actually know quite a lot about her and quite a lot too about how Holbein came to undertake the Commission for Henry the eighth's and paint her which is quite unusual for the 16th century so we must make the most of all the letters and documents that we have here and in those documents there's quite a lot of talk about Christina and her beauty now she was a 16 year old widow and she had quite a hard life early on in her life she was born as a daughter to the King of Denmark in 1521 and when she was a small child the whole family had to flee from Denmark Christian was introducing the Protestant Reformation not everybody agreed with that there were some quite brutal things going on and he fled to the Low Countries to the court of Brussels to the relatives of his wife taking his three young children with him of whom one was Christina so she was if you like a rather grand refugee as a child even in her childhood living at the court she was married aged 11 by proxy to the Duke of Milan the marriage didn't last very long because when she was 13 already she became a widow and she is wearing here her black widows robes so she was talked about as a beautiful 16 year old widow at the court in Brussels one of many many women many possible candidates for marriage to King Henry the eighth's so people got quite excited about her they they talked about the fact that she had dimples which showed when she smiled that she had a lisp when she talked which they said was very attractive and that she was tall for the average height at this time and I think this is more or less a life-size portrait and it the portrait I think shows off her height and her beauty very well her hands are prominent she was said to have exceptionally beautiful hands as well so there was a lot of chatter and a lot of excitement about this 16 year old girl so she's shown before us wearing these black robes but they are extremely luxurious widow's weeds if you like she's wearing a most beautiful black satin coat a full length coat is just falling in fold sort of rippling to the floor there and catching the light this is one of the things that Holbein does so beautifully a lot of people wore black at this time but he really makes the most of the contrasts and textures of different kinds of black fabrics so this was a very luxurious coat made even more luxurious as you can see by the fact that it's all lined with fur can see the the collar and then the lining as he follows it all the way down to the floor so she would have been quite cozy in robe underneath she's wearing a plain black dress and this robe is just drawn together by some black silk ribbons which you can probably just see there at her waist under the black dress she is wearing a white chemise a white shirt with a ruffled neck that you can see there and ruffled cuffs which also you may just be able to see have a very fine line of black embroidery at the edge just showing off those beautiful hands there she's holding buff-colored leather gloves very fine leather they would also have been very expensive and she's wearing one single ring with a red stone and that may be a ring that signifies her mourning as well so by this time she's been wearing mourning for three years her hair is virtually hidden underneath the black cap that she's wearing you may just be able to see to the left that there's a bit of a gray lining to it and on the right hand side you may be just be able to see silhouetted there are two rows of trimming which is probably a kind of chenille velvet trimming to the cap so she's wearing sumptuous rich textures to make up her mourning clothes and of course those show off all the more the parts of her that we can see her beautiful hands and her beautiful face can't quite see those dimples but we can imagine those I'm going to talk about what happened in 1538 when this painting was commissioned and painted in just a moment but let me just tell you a bit about Christina's later life she was always talked about as the one who got away because and maybe not spoiling the story for you entirely by telling you that she didn't marry Henry the eighth's although he was very very interested in her and the story goes that she said well if she had two heads then she would willingly place one of those at king henry's disposal but actually we do have a little bit more information than that and I think we can probably assume that that was a pretty apocryphal story because it is documented that what she did say to Henry the eighth's ambassadors when she was asked her opinion about marrying Henry is essentially who didn't have any opinion but she was the emperor's servant and the Emperor was the Emperor Charles the fifth key political figure in this time and she was at the court of his aunt Mary of Hungary and she was going to do whatever he wanted so the feisty reply I think unfortunately we can discount so the sixteen-year-old beauty is represented here and this was a painting made for King Henry the eighth I'm sure I don't need to tell you that King Henry the eighth's had six wives what's key for considering this painting is that Christina potentially was there to be the fourth wife so Henry had divorced Catherine of Aragon he married Anne Boleyn that went very badly that ended in her execution for adultery and then he married Jane Seymour now Jane Seymour was the person who bore him the long awaited son the future King Edward the sixth but unfortunately she died just a few days after giving birth to him in autumn 1537 so immediately after that Henry was on the lookout for a fourth wife so he had his ambassadors scar the court of Europe he wanted to know who was out there and he had some ideas about how to choose between them that seemed pretty odd to some of the ambassadors so for example he thought it would be a very good idea to have a beauty parade of potential candidates at Calais so Callie was of course at this point under English rule he thought it would be very easy for him to come over by boat and enjoy this beauty parade and you know pick in person who he thought might suit him well that went down very very badly with the French Court they were very scandalized by that idea so that wasn't going to work out but of course in this period this was an age long before photographs so how was the king of England going to get a good idea of who was sufficiently attractive sufficiently beautiful and sufficiently free of all kinds of possible defects in order to marry the king and perhaps produce another heir are you he had an heir but of course he needed the spare so a young 16 year old bride seemed as though she might just be possibly up to the job so how is he going to get a likeness of her well there's actually quite a lot of correspondence about this and we know that there was more than one pretty botched portrait that seems to have been sent over to England now the ambassador's um had already seen her they had given him these very good reports of her her lisper lovely dimples she was compared to a mistress Shelton who was one of the court beauties so there was tremendous enthusiasm but they really wanted a good likeness and the portraits they were being sent they didn't think we're going to do the job at all for Henry so Henry turned to Hans Holbein who fortunately he had on his payroll at court ready to carry out the bidding of the king and to be his court portraitist and in fact through 1538 and 1539 Holbein was kept extremely busy by being sent to europe to scout out and portray women who were thought to be the potential brides for henry in the spring of 1538 he was sent to Brussels now Holbein was perhaps the greatest of all portraitists in Europe at that moment so Henry was very very fortunate to have him on his staff as it were hope I was a German artist born in Augsburg at the end of the 15th century so he was about 40 at the height of his powers when he was commissioned to paint Christina he had been working in England since the 1520's he came there from Basel in Switzerland where he'd gone to make his fortune but the prospects for an artist turned really rather negative after the Reformation started there so having spent a couple of years in England in the 1520's he came back to England he was backed by 1532 and pretty much stayed over here in London until his death in 1543 and Henry the eighth's paid him a substantial salary 30 pounds a year now it's not set out anywhere exactly what tasks he was supposed to undertake for that salary but he was multi-talented he could design beautiful jewelry and Goldsmith's wear for the court for example we have many such drawings that survived by Holbein he could paint subject pictures religious pictures and for Henry at Whitehall palace he painted an enormous life-size dynastic portrait of Henry the eighth's vii and their two wives henry with jane seymour who died just around the time this great commission was completed so he could make really magnificent full-length portraits and having a full-length portrait for a potential bride was really really important we have documents going back to Henry the sixth time in the middle of the 15th century saying how very important it was when considering a potential bride to be able to see their whole figure all of their limbs after all they wanted to make sure they weren't lacking any of them so an authentic portrait by a trusted artist was going to bring back all of that vital information so a full-length portrait was really important and Holbein by this time had really shown what he could do portraits of Henry portraits of his family and many portraits of people at Henry's court quite a number of these paintings survived of course here you know we have whole Bynes ambassadors just right next to us and there are also many beautiful drawings that Holbein made of people at the court that survive today most of them in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle and they're always worth a good look so Holbein was eminently qualified to carry out this commission and the Commission is very very well documented in letters sent back by Henry's ambassador Sir Philip Hobie now hope I wasn't going to be sent over to Brussels to take this portrait once it had been agreed all by himself he had to have a trusted diplomat with him we still don't know very much about whole bynes language skills at this period he was born a German he would have spoken German in Switzerland we assume by the time he'd spent several years working in England that his English was quite decent but we really don't know but we have some very long letters written by Sir Philip Toby which tell us exactly what went on so first of all of course they had to cross the English Channel in March that took a few days they got to Brussels on the 8th of March and on the 10th of March Holbein was given a sitting with Christina and this is one of the most interesting pieces of information we have about how whole by made portraits because we're told that he had three hours with her three hours space they say unfortunately because this Commission isn't at all typical we don't know whether it was usual for him to spend three hours with his sitters when he was making portraits or not neither do we know for certain what exactly he did during those three hours now I've referred to hold by making drawings of his sitters and the numbers of drawings that survived and we have quite a few cases in which we've got a drawing and then we've got the portrait so we know that he needed the drawing in order to make a painted portrait in the case of Christina it seems really unlikely I think that hope I would have crossed the channel in the March gales in an open boat with a panel this size this is a big oak panel it's surely much more likely that he took several sheets of paper with him his colored chalks his inks that he liked to work with and that he made a series of drawings of Christina which were then going to serve him very well in making the finished portrait don't know that for certain this is surmise but I think that that's very likely so what might he have done in his three hours well I think he would absolutely have made a drawing of her face was going to be pretty vital and I think it's no accident that he's showing her full face looking directly at us now that's not the case with many of his other portraits people are shown slightly to one side slightly to the other side but I think Henry wanted to see as much of that face as possible so he wanted a full face drawing there and he probably would have worked that up on a piece of paper that was coated in a pink watercolor so that's the case for most of the drawings that survived that whole buy made in the 1530s he would select we think a piece of paper covered in a pink shade that would approximate to his citizen that was a way of sort of speeding things up he had these really prepared sheets so he would say yep this light pink perhaps here is the shade that I need then he would have set to work probably with black chalk in the first place and had it perhaps some red chalk for those beautiful red lips Brown for the brown eyes that she has and in a number of his portrait drawings he also makes notes in black ink notes to himself notes usually in German and their color notes usually so they might be there's one drawing of a man in which he says the eyes are a little yellowish doesn't sound terribly nice there are other drawings in which he talks about the colors and textures often he says this bits to be black velvet this bits to be black sat in the drawings that survive are usually head and shoulders drawings not much more so we can imagine a head and shoulders drawing of Christina perhaps with some notes on her eye color perhaps with some notes on the black satin robe that she's wearing but he wouldn't have worked much of that detail in a head and shoulders drawing what he may also have made is a costume drawing and we do have one or two very beautiful quite detailed drawings that he made of women when he first came to England perhaps because he was trying to understand the style of dress which was different from the style in Switzerland and perhaps with Christina he would have made a drawing of that type we have one drawing in which he shows the woman from the back and from the front so he can completely understand the style of dress that she's wearing so he may have made a costume drawing of Christina and in one or two cases we have detailed drawings of hands and it's my surmise that because Christina's hands are so prominent in this composition and because she was supposed to have such beautiful hands that he did make a drawing of her hands so I think he would have made these drawings in the three hours that he had allotted to him and then he would have taken all of those drawings back with him on the boat back to the court in London now what is really interesting is an ambassador's report from the London Court on Hall binds return which says that Henry was immediately delighted with what Holbein had brought back now I think that couldn't possibly have been a full-length painted portrait they just wouldn't have been time I think he must have seen some really beautiful drawings and he was so overjoyed by what he saw that we're told he set musicians to play all day long so there was a tremendous celebration but of course this could not last because the marriage plans fell through Christina did escape with her head and the next year Henry went on to marry Anne of Cleves and we know that didn't work out too well either but I will say that I don't think that that was because Holbein misled Henry if you look into what may have gone wrong it was more to do with the clothing that and war the languages or lack of languages there were many things about her that Henry didn't like Holbein kept his head it was Thomas Cromwell who lost his over that marriage now Christina went on to have quite a long life she lived until 1590 and she did actually marry again she married the Duke of Lorraine but unfortunately for her that marriage didn't last long at all the second husband died very shortly afterwards says she was plunged into mourning again and although there were plans for her to marry a third time in fact she even came over to England again to pursue those plans though it wasn't to an Englishman they fell through and she spent the rest of her life living quietly in Europe away from the hurly-burly of the English Court now what happened to this painting then I think is very very interesting so Henry was thrilled with whatever Holbein brought back for him probably drawings but he was we think particularly pleased with this portrait because he kept it he kept it in his collection and that's that's unusual they don't seem to be other paintings by Holbein that he kept but this one can be identified and I think that some of the reasons why he was so entranced and beguiled by this portrait we can see here just looking at it whole bite has so cleverly I think given the impression that she's just slightly moving and moving towards us and he does it so subtly by the way in which he situates her in space you can see there's a shadow on the right hand side is there a doorway somewhere there we don't know Holbein often use very ambivalent blue background sometimes it suggests the sky rather than the kind of paneled rooms that you would surely have found indoors in palaces and then on the other side you can see her shadow reflected against the wall so you get a very clear sense of how he situated her in space but although as I've said it was really important to show her full face so Henry got a very good view of what she looked like Holbein was just very very slightly set her at an angle to the left so I think she seems to move it's suggested on the diagonal from that corner of the room perhaps coming through a doorway over this way where she casts a shadow on the ground so to my mind it seems as though she's just about to glide through space towards us and I think that's a very beguiling and seductive way of presenting the sixteen year old widow so Henry kept this portrait he hung on to it and it was in his inventories of his possessions after his death and then it seems it was really fought over by some quite eminent people in 16th century England at one time it was owned by the Earl of Pembroke then by Lord Lumley who had a famous collection of paintings including many works by Holbein then in the 17th century it passed into the collection of the Earl of Arundel who confessed his some weakness for works by Holbein then it descended in his family for several centuries before ending up in the collection of the Dukes of Norfolk and it came on loan to the National Gallery in 1880 it was on loan here for 28 years and in fact it came as a tremendous shock to many people when in 1908 the Duke of Norfolk first proposed he was going to sell this paint most people assume the National Gallery owned it but we didn't now the Duke of Norfolk I think sometimes gets a little bit of a bad press about his motives for selling this painting there were a lot of aristocratic owners of pictures at this period the end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th century who were starting to sell off their paintings and there were some very wealthy collectors in America particularly at this time who were only too pleased to acquire them legislation had been passed which made it easier for aristocracy assets to be released and many people took advantage of this now when the Duke of Norfolk came to talk to the director of the National Gallery Charles Holroyd in 1908 what he said was that he felt that by selling this painting he could do a great deal of good with the money he wasn't after the money for himself but for his own charitable enterprises so I think it's worth just noting that and he gave the gallery notice that he wanted to sell the painting well fast-forward a year and he told the gallery that he was selling the painting in April 1909 that he had a buyer for the painting that he was selling it to the dealers Cole Nargis for 60,000 pounds and the gallery had only a couple of weeks to try to match that sum of money so ensuing panic how was the gallery going to find what was an enormous sum of money to buy this beautiful painting by Holbein they didn't quite know at that time you could call on the government to give you a grant for the purchase of paintings I mean I think today our equivalent is the very generous heritage Lottery Fund but we were lucky that the national art collections fund had been set up six years earlier and they were extremely keen to try to help to raise money so there was a public campaign and there was the kind of controversy about acquiring this picture in the press that we're perhaps familiar with today why should we bother to acquire a painting by a foreign artist why should we bother to acquire a painting of a duchess one newspaper said we have plenty of English duchesses of our own to look at we don't need to look at this one as well so it was a very public controversy and a public campaign and things moved on very very quickly because while money was still being raised news came in that the painting had been sold again and the price had gone up it was now over seventy thousand pounds and a deal had been done so that the painting was going to end up in America and the buyer was going to be the famous Henry Clay Frick if you've been to the Frick Collection you'll see his two wonderful whole binds Thomas More on Thomas Cromwell facing each other across the fireplace and he aimed to add this painting to them so everybody was really up against this final deadline and the art funders they're now called were in there with their public campaign receiving very generous donations but they were up against a weekend deadline now what actually slightly worked him everyone's favor over here was that there was a bank holiday and they didn't actually realize on the other side of the Atlantic that there was a bank holiday which just gave us a little bit more time and it was felt publicly by many people that this painting must be seized from the Americans and there's a wonderful cartoon in which Uncle Sam is shown dragging Cristina out of the frame of this Henry James wrote a play called the outcry because this there was an outcry about this now at the very very last minute what happened to save this painting was that an anonymous woman stepped in and gave 40,000 pounds to contribute to the total that the gallery needed to save this picture it was said to be a very large portion of her personal fortune but we do not know to this day who she was her identity has been kept completely secret because she gave the money on condition that nobody would ever know who she was now even today with you know freedom of information people have challenged this and asked who was she but we and the art fund have kept absolutely silent I don't know her identity there's been a lot of speculation it's interesting I think that she was apparently a woman she was on holiday at a spar in Germany when she decided to offer the money but many people who were keen on what later became the cause of women's suffrage were very enthusiastic about saving this painting so possibly it was a woman who was allied to those interests I don't think we shall ever know but we just have to heave a huge sigh of relief and say a very big thank you to the anonymous benefactor who ensured that we can see this painting today in the national gallery thank you you

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Keywords: Hans Holbein, Hans Holbein the Younger, Christina of Denmark, Henry VIII, King Henry VIII, Art Fund, The Frick Collection, Henry Clay Frick, Duke of Norfolk, Earl of Pembroke, Earl of Arundel, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell

Id: mCPxw_x15Iw

Length: 32min 44sec (1964 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 12 2018