Hans Holbein at the court of Henry VIII

Hans Holbein was one of the most important and impressive artists of the early 16th century. I think Holbein still catches our imagination and he partly catches our imagination because through him we can see the figures of the Tudor court, we can see those faces of the men and women that we read about. The core of the collection of Holbein's in the Royal Collection is 80 drawings from the court of Henry VIII and those are accompanied by a number of paintings, a small handful of miniatures and some illustrated books. Holbein was born in Germany. He was the son of an artist and came from a family of artists so he was trained from a young age and he moved with his brother Ambrosius to the Swiss city of Basel and made a career there and he was doing really really well until 1526 when the career of painters started to dry up in Basel so the reformation meant there was less demand for panel paintings and stained glass in churches and Holbein is one of the artists that goes elsewhere to seek more work and he chooses to go to England. In Basel lived the philosopher Erasmus. Erasmus was a great friend of a man in England called Sir Thomas More. He seems to have written Holbein a letter of reference and Holbein seems to take this with him to London and Thomas More becomes his first patron in England. You can see him getting more and more commissions and then works for More's circle of senior government officials, often very literary figures, and he becomes it seems the favoured portrait artist of the Tudor court. We have no documentation for the way in which Holbein's commissions in England happened but from the portraits and from the identities of the sitters you can sometimes extrapolate some ideas and one of the most interesting sitters in this regard is a man called Thomas Lestrange of Norfolk who is not a well-known name but his accounts survive and we know a lot about his family and who he was dining with and it becomes clear that he has relationships with a number of the Holbein sitters. His wife is the sister of Baron Vaux. When you look at the dates Baron Vaux and Lady Vaux have their portraits made in 1535 and Thomas Lestrange seems to commission his in 1536. So you start to wonder if there was a dinner party, did they all sit around and say oh there's this amazing artist, he's come from Germany, he's come from Basel. Considering the drawings are nearly 500 years old they're in very good condition. My role for this was not about any treatment options, it was more understanding the materials and techniques and providing that information. So it's important to examine the drawings and we do that in multiple ways. So we might use different light sources, sort of waking light so you get light from the side and that can give you texture and we also examine more closely so through a microscope so you can really zoom in on the detail and you can start to see how he may have built up the layers of the different materials so perhaps starting with the black chalk outline then adding red. Usually last in the piece is more of a kind of water-based media. He used two types of paper, one was unprepared so it's a plain surface and the other type has a preparation on it which in this case is pink in varying shades. Plain paper it meant when he was creating the flesh tones of the sitter he had to build up the chalks in layers and blend those so it took more time. With the pink paper he already started with a base layer, he could choose one that best matched that sitter and then on that he would individualise the flesh tone of that sitter. It is so exciting to see William Reskimer and William Reskimer, the preparatory drawing that Holbein made when he was starting to think about the panel painting and then the finished painting itself, the two next to each other and you can take his work from that very first chalk mark that he made on his prepared paper right the way through to the final brush stroke. As far as outlines go and actually physically transferring the two, I mean is he tracing here? We think so, it is a one-to-one transfer in terms of proportions. Then obviously the missing item, you know, are his hands and the drawing. The past of it was such good hands, it must have been a drawing, it had to be a drawing. And we know with this one that this panel was reused. In terms of analysis we have an x-ray of the painting, we have an infrared reflectogram which both show different things, so the x-ray will show you the whole structure including the not only the panel but also the wooden cradle that's been subsequently attached to the back of the panel, so you get everything in one image. With infrared it goes just beneath the surface. It was a reused panel, possibly in its first use. It had not been intended, you know, to last terribly long, certainly, you know, never intended to have a Holbein portrait on it. If we want to understand Holbein's work in Tudor England, the Royal Collection becomes incredibly important. This is the majority of the surviving portrait drawings from Holbein's time in England at the Tudor court, so this is the core of our understanding of Holbein's portrait practice in the court of Henry VIII.