Holbein: ‘a superb and groundbreaking biography’

If the Tudors “exercise a stronger hold on the public imagination than their Plantagenet precursors or Stuart successors”, it is largely “because we can all picture them so clearly”, said Peter Marshall in Literary Review. And that, in turn, is down to one man: the German artist Hans Holbein. Between the late 1520s and the early 1540s, Holbein lived mostly in England and produced an “extraordinary sequence of portraits and drawings” of Henry VIII, his wives and courtiers.

Today, as Elizabeth Goldring explains in her “superb and groundbreaking biography”, it is hard to “appreciate just how novel Holbein’s portraits appeared to the first people who saw them”.

Before he emerged, portraiture was a fairly underdeveloped art form in northern Europe. Yet suddenly, as Goldring puts it, here was a painter who made viewers feel that they’d been “granted access to the sitter’s inner thoughts and feelings”. No wonder that Holbein – a “workaholic” and also a “relentless pragmatist, willing at the drop of a brush to change artistic direction or abandon sinking patrons for rising ones” – thrived in the cut-throat Tudor world.

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Holbein was born in Augsburg in 1497, the son of an artist, Hans Holbein the Elder, who specialised in altarpieces. He got his “big break” in 1523, when the humanist scholar Erasmus commissioned him to paint his portrait, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. Erasmus introduced Holbein to Henry VIII’s courtier, Thomas More, who became his chief patron during an early stint in England in the late 1520s.

Returning a few years later, Holbein had to navigate More’s execution in 1535 – at which point he “shrewdly pivoted towards the new man Thomas Cromwell” – and then Cromwell’s downfall in 1540, said Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian.

Despite such ructions, Holbein remained in Henry’s favour until his death, from the plague, in 1543. Thanks to Goldring’s “careful analysis” of his work, aided by more than 250 high-quality reproductions, “Holbein the artist comes vividly to life”, said Katherine Harvey in The Times.

The man himself remains more elusive, but “there are glimpses of a less than exemplary private life”: Holbein effectively abandoned his wife, Elsbeth, and their children in Germany while he pursued success in England, and while here he “fathered at least two children”.

In both life and art, Holbein had a “talent for catching every rising tide”, said Mathew Lyons in The Spectator. Goldring’s “superbly scholarly biography” will surely prove the “definitive account” of this remarkable figure “for many years to come”.