James Fox TV - Tim Marlow TV - Waldemar Januszczak TV - Andrew Graham-Dixon TV - Helen Rosslyn TV -
Hans Holbein arrived in England in the Autumn of 1526. He was just 29 years old. He came with no friends and family. He didn’t speak a word of the language, and he virtually had no money. But Holbein had big ambitions. Holbein had made his reputation as a portrait painter in the Swiss city of Basel. James Fox, A Very British Renaissance I: The Renaissance Arrives, BBC 2014
Holbein’s women are just as fascinating: beautiful, ethereal and so elegantly anxious. ibid.
Holbein’s drawing as the first really lifelike faces in the whole of British history. ibid.
And Holbein captured this radical worldview in his most famous painting, one of the great paintings of the Renaissance, The Ambassadors. ibid.
Hans Holbein has claims to be the greatest portrait painter who ever wielded a brush. A central figure in the spread of the renaissance in northern Europe whose deftness and pinpoint accuracy captured the spirit and the faces of his age. Great Artists With Tim Marlow s1e16: Hans Holbein, Sky Arts 2003
One of the most eloquent examples of painting inspired by the ideas of the Reformation as well as being one of the most powerful works in the entire history of religious art is this one: Holbein’s image of the dead Christ painted in 1521. ibid.
He can’t find work in Basel. So in the end, in 1532, he goes back to England and never returns, leaving the family effectively to fend for themselves. ibid.
Holbein is commissioned to paint what becomes his more celebrated, famous and complex work – this one The Ambassadors, painted in 1533 ... This form here in the foreground that you can only see when you start to walk and look from another perspective, then you see clearly from this angle that it’s a skull. ibid.
Within three years of painting The Ambassadors Holbein got the position he really wanted: painter to the King. And began a series of portraits that have defined how that most familiar of English monarchs has been seen down the ages. ibid.
Holbein’s influence on British painting is enormous. He made the human individual seem more real and more exposed than any artist before him. ibid.
Now that’s what you call Henry VIII: look at the way he [Henry VII] stands – like a Tudor gunslinger at Ye OK Corral. The mighty torso. The sheer width of the man. This is a king who could change history. That’s the Henry who lives up here in our thoughts. Henry the Terrible. The widest king in Christendom. Waldemar Januszczak, Holbein: Eye of the Tudors – A Culture Show Special, BBC 2015
An artist who I would argue didn’t just record British history, he changed it. He was a funny little man. A Bavarian from Germany. ibid.
What he was really good at was religious painting. ibid.
Thomas More: One of the most resolute presences in British art. ibid.
This time he would be working not just in royal circles but for the King himself. ibid.
Henry needed portraits of himself to hand out to passing dignitaries, people he was trying to impress. ibid.
Holbein was no longer in the business of telling the truth. ibid.
Cromwell, who’d sent Holbein to Europe to paint Anne, was blamed for the mistake. And a few weeks after the wedding he was accused of treason and beheaded. ibid.
Holbein’s most famous painting in the National Gallery in London is usually called The Ambassadors. ibid.
He left behind some of the greatest portraiture of the Renaissance. ibid.
Holbein’s great gift to British art was a deceptively simply realism which he applied to everyone he ever painted or drew. Andrew Graham-Dixon, A History of British Art II: North & South, BBC 1996
Holbein’s technique has never been surpassed. ibid.
Holbein is the greatest draftsman in history. ibid.
There are over 80 Holbein drawings from Henry’s reign. Andrew Graham-Dixon: Art, Passion & Power: The Story of the Royal Collection I: Dangerous Magic, BBC 2018
Just £50 bought a full-length portrait from Holbein. Helen Rosslyn, Bought With Love: The Secret History of British Art Collections I: The Pioneers, BBC 2013