Paintings

A letter bends between a merchant's fingers. A queen's sleeves spread into a broad, still shape. A dead man's foot comes almost to the end of a stone enclosure. Hans Holbein the Younger's paintings repeatedly make us aware of the space a body occupies and of the things touching it: cloth, paper, jewellery, armour, another person's hand.

His surviving pictures take us from religious commissions in Basel to scholars, merchants and the Tudor court. Their purposes vary as much as their subjects. An altarpiece could change its appearance as its wings opened; a portrait could carry someone's likeness across a border; a palace mural could place a living king beside his dead parents. ^{[1] [2] [3]} The familiar image of Henry VIII belongs within this much larger painted world.

Finding a way through the paintings

Begin by choosing two pictures whose arrangements differ. A crowded religious scene and a solitary portrait will reveal more of Holbein's range than a row of similarly dressed courtiers. Look first at the edges: how much room lies above the head, where the hands meet the lower border, whether the figure appears to stand behind a ledge or directly before us. These decisions establish a relationship with the viewer before names and dates enter it.

Basel's religious paintings offer an especially useful starting point. The museum's exhibition devoted to Holbein's years there, 1515–32, brought altarpieces and portraits into the same account of his work. ^[1] We can follow that connection by watching how figures are held together: by a shared sacred event, a protecting mantle, family contact or the boundaries of a portrait panel.

Keep three questions beside the pictures. What kind of object is this? What was it made to do? Whose painted surface survives? A title such as Henry VIII answers none of those questions by itself. It may identify a small original portrait, a workshop version of a larger design or a later copy. Learning the distinction makes the visible choices more interesting: one painter retains a pose, another changes the setting, and the same king begins to occupy a different kind of space.

Religious stories and the exposed body

The Passion Altarpiece presents eight episodes across four narrow panels, originally the two wings of a folding altar. The Kunstmuseum Basel dates the paintings to about 1524–26. ^[8] Follow the upper row from prayer in the garden through arrest and interrogation to the Flagellation, then return to the lower left for the scenes leading to death and burial. The sequence changes the pace of looking. A solitary kneeling figure gives way to a crowd; a body concealed by surrounding men becomes pale and conspicuous against darkness.

Architecture helps make the pressure felt. Columns and arches give the punishments a formal setting, while weapons break the spaces into sharp diagonals. In the Entombment, the pale carrying cloth hangs between supporting hands. The body that has been seized and struck must now be borne. Small figures carry actions large enough to remain legible across the ensemble.

Compare that abundance with The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb , painted in 1521–22. Here the mourners have disappeared. Head, torso and feet extend across a panel little more than thirty centimetres high and over two metres long. ^[9] The eye has to travel along the body. It cannot take refuge in another figure's response.

The stone roof leaves a narrow interval above the flesh. The hand near the foreground edge brings the body towards us, while the feet mark the enclosure's far end. These spatial facts make the encounter unusually insistent. The painting gives sustained attention to a dead body without depicting the movement that placed it there or the next event in the Christian story.

Its original function remains uncertain. The museum discusses Christian Müller's proposal that it was intended for an Amerbach family memorial, while retaining the reconstruction as a hypothesis. ^[9] That uncertainty need not prevent looking. It does prevent us from treating the surviving rectangle as a complete account of its first setting, or its starkness as a declaration of Holbein's private belief.

Donors gathered around the Virgin

In the Solothurn Madonna of 1522, Mary and the child sit between two standing saints: the bishop St Martin on the viewer's left and the armoured St Ursus on the right. ^[10] Fabric and metal establish two kinds of splendour around a small, exposed infant. Mary's broad mantle gives the central group its weight; the upright saints and the barred opening above make the surrounding space firm.

Notice how little distance separates the figures from the foreground. The patterned carpet approaches the picture's edge, and the saints stand beside Mary rather than retreating into a deep landscape. The sacred gathering feels close enough for differences between polished armour, layered vestments and flesh to become part of the encounter.

The Darmstadt Madonna changes the relationship between sacred and human figures. Its fuller title names the patron, Jacob Meyer zum Hasen. Würth's collection dates the original to 1525/26 and 1528 and identifies it as inventory 14910, associated with the Johanniterkirche in Schwäbisch Hall. ^[11] The traditional Darmstadt name therefore does not describe its present collection home.

Mary stands beneath a shell-shaped niche. Kneeling figures gather below her mantle, yet their faces, ages and clothes remain distinct. The eye can move from Meyer's raised gaze to the praying girl opposite, then down towards the children in the foreground. A shared shelter joins people who retain separate presences.

This picture is a helpful bridge towards the portraits. The care given to a donor's face belongs inside an act of devotion; likeness and religious purpose occupy the same painting. Mary's tall, darkly clothed body rises above the kneeling figures. Their different scales and directions make the protection of the mantle visible as a relationship between bodies.

Scholars, likenesses and the household

The 1523 Erasmus from the Longford Castle collection, on loan to the National Gallery, places the scholar's hands on a closed red book. This is a different composition from the portraits in which he writes. The National Gallery records that Erasmus sent it to William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1524. ^[12] The painting could make a person present to someone elsewhere.

Look at the relationship between the hands and the face. Fingers spread across the book while the head turns slightly away. Fur widens the shoulders and wrists, making the visible flesh more distinct. At the margins, a curtain, carved architectural ornament and a shelf of books furnish the encounter. The scholar has a physical setting as well as an intellectual reputation.

That distinction between a plausible person and a carefully arranged portrait remains useful before Sir Thomas More , painted in 1527 and now at the Frick. ^[13] More's forearms gather near the lower edge; his head turns beyond them. The red sleeves have deep, compressed folds, while a gold chain draws a bright curve across brown fur. Rich materials describe the body carrying them. They also give the figure breadth without requiring a large surrounding room.

More's eyes do not meet ours. It is easy to attach later knowledge of his death to that diverted attention, but the painting supplies no dependable access to a private thought. Compare its stillness with Erasmus's: both are physically near, yet neither seems obliged to answer the spectator.

Holbein's own household offers another arrangement. The Artist's Family , about 1528–29, shows Elsbeth with their two elder children, Philipp and Katharina. The museum records the unusual painted-paper support, cut around the figures and mounted on wood. ^[5] Its present edges therefore belong to a history of alteration as well as to the painted grouping.

One hand rests around the boy's shoulder, while the other supports the younger child. The children's attention moves towards the right, beyond the surviving field. Their mother occupies the broad upper centre, but the outward glances keep the group from closing into itself. Set beside the devotional paintings, the family makes a revealing comparison: touch can hold people together even when their attention travels in different directions.

Merchants and diplomats among objects

In Georg Giese , dated 1532, a face emerges from a busy merchant's setting. The Berlin collection identifies Giese with the German trading community at London's Steelyard. ^[14] Sealed letters, a balance, boxes and writing equipment give his activity a material world. Yet the painting rewards a slower approach than identifying each object in turn.

Begin with the letter in his hands. Its folds catch light in broad planes, unlike the small, intermittent gleams on metal. The pink sleeves have longer, smoother highlights; the black gown absorbs much of the surrounding brightness. The glass vase allows stems, water and the patterned table covering to remain visible through it. A single picture offers several different experiences of what light can do.

The objects also control access to the sitter. The table intervenes between his body and ours. Shelves press around his head, while the lettering and seals invite close inspection at the edges. Giese's glance draws us back across this surrounding detail. We repeatedly leave the face and return to it.

Stephan Kemperdick's Berlin commentary describes substantial revisions to the room and the position of the head. ^[14] The finished interior is consequently worth studying as an arrangement developed during painting. The precision of its individual objects does not guarantee a room whose every angle could be reconstructed consistently.

A year later, The Ambassadors expands the portrait into a nearly square, full-length encounter. Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve stand on either side of shelves filled with instruments, books and musical objects. The National Gallery's catalogue identifies the sitters and dates the work to 1533. ^[15] Their clothes establish different silhouettes before we know anything about their diplomatic or religious positions: pale fur opens the left figure, while the right figure forms a more continuous dark column.

Then the elongated skull cuts across the lower foreground. Seen frontally, it resists the solid appearance of the other things. From a sharply oblique position, its recognisable form emerges. The picture brings together objects we seem able to inspect securely and one that makes our position decisive. ^[15]

Resist trying to translate the entire arrangement into one short message. Follow a smaller question instead. How does the lute project beyond its shelf? How do the men's hands differ? What happens when attention moves from a painted face to the distorted skull? The skull keeps troubling a first impression of orderly possession.

The Tudor court and the absent sitter

Holbein had become King's Painter by 1536. ^[2] Court portraiture required likeness to work within the display of rank, and sometimes to travel in advance of a possible marriage. The painted figure had to remain persuasive when the person was absent.

The small autograph Henry VIII in Madrid's Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, dated about 1537, measures only 28 × 20 centimetres. ^[16] Its physical size is a useful correction to the expectation that a commanding king must occupy a large painting. Breadth, costume and the placement of the head can establish authority within a compact field.

Compare that economy with Jane Seymour , about 1536–37, in Vienna. ^[17] Her headdress gives the head a firm outer shape, answered below by the spreading sleeves. Ornament crosses the bodice in narrow lines. The clasped hands provide a compact meeting point within the large arrangement of dress. Looking slowly reveals how a restrained pose can sustain many changes of scale, from the whole silhouette to a single jewel.

Christina of Denmark offers a different form of royal scrutiny. Holbein met her in Brussels in March 1538 during Henry VIII's search for a wife. Susan Foister's catalogue distinguishes the documented three-hour sitting from the subsequent making of the full-length painting: it does not mean that this large panel was completed in three hours. ^[18]

The black gown fills a long vertical field. Face, white cuffs and hands become conspicuous intervals within it. Held gloves occupy the centre, while the train spreads along the floor. There is little furniture to give the eye an alternative task. Compared with Giese's room, the spare setting makes the figure's outline itself carry much of the encounter.

These portraits help explain the breadth within court painting. A small king, an elaborately dressed queen and a full-length prospective bride solve different problems of scale and presentation. Their stillness can feel related, but the relationship between body, clothing and surrounding space changes from one to the next.

Beauty beyond an identified likeness

A woman extends an open hand above coins on a ledge in Laïs Corinthiaca , dated 1526. The classical name identifies a celebrated courtesan. Basel's collection commentary rejects treating the face as a securely identified portrait of a particular Offenburg woman and instead discusses an idealised, Leonardesque type. ^[19]

The offered palm makes a distinctive comparison with the portrait hands. Erasmus's fingers occupy a book; Giese handles a letter; More holds his hands together. Laïs directs a gesture towards the viewer across a stone threshold. Her lowered head and richly patterned clothing belong to an encounter organised around the role named by the inscription.

Beside it, Venus with Cupid repeats recognisable features while changing the arrangement. A child enters the foreground and the woman's extended arm opens towards the side. Similarity can initially make the two pictures appear straightforward companions by one painter.

Their authorship now requires a distinction. The Kunstmuseum Basel assigns Venus with Cupid , about 1526–28, to the Venus-Maler, an unnamed assistant in Holbein's workshop. Its commentary explains the picture as a variation after Laïs . ^[6] The comparison brings us close to the movement of designs within a workshop. A shared facial type may connect two pictures without establishing that the same hand painted both surfaces.

Lost murals, workshop paintings and later copies

The full-length Henry VIII reproduced here belongs to the Walker Art Gallery and is attributed to Holbein's workshop. ^[4] Look at the spread feet and projecting elbows, then at the patterned curtain on the right. The figure occupies the room expansively. That powerful arrangement can be studied while keeping the painter's identity distinct from Holbein's authorship of the model.

Behind this portrait family lies the Whitehall mural of 1537. It brought Henry VIII and Jane Seymour together with Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. The original was destroyed in the palace fire of 1698. Remigius van Leemput's smaller painted copy, dated 1667, preserves the complete composition in the Royal Collection. ^[3] It lets us recover the dynastic grouping, while remaining an object made by another artist more than a century later.

Holbein's surviving Whitehall cartoon provides a different kind of evidence. The large preparatory drawing contains the two kings and belongs to the development of the mural itself. Henry VIII's head turns more than it does in the finished design recorded by copies. ^[7] A preparatory work can therefore reveal a decision that repetition of the familiar final pose would conceal.

Keep these objects separate when browsing: the Madrid panel is an autograph painting; the cartoon is a drawing for a lost wall painting; the Walker full-length is a workshop version; and Leemput's group is a later copy. Each has a different relationship to the missing original. A reproduction that gives only the artist's name and sitter loses much of that history.

The More household presents another important case. Holbein's original family painting is lost, but studies and later painted versions preserve evidence of the composition. The large Nostell picture, Sir Thomas More and his Family , is catalogued by the National Trust as after Holbein, about 1592–1620. Its traditional association with Rowland Lockey rests partly on a later inscription naming him and giving 1592; that inscription does not establish an autograph Holbein or a firmly dated Lockey painting. ^[20]

Copies deserve attention for what they retain and change. A surviving version may preserve the disposition of people in a vanished work, while its materials, colour and individual passages belong to a later painter. We can value that evidence without pretending to stand before the lost surface.

For another route through the pictures, follow a single action. Compare hands supporting the child in the Darmstadt Madonna with those supporting Christ in the Passion Altarpiece . Compare Erasmus's closed book with Giese's opened correspondence, or Christina's long gown with Henry's planted legs. Such pairings lead from one painting to another through things the eye can test.