Holbein in England at Tate Britain 2006
Tate Britain’s sober but exemplary new exhibition, “Hans Holbein in England”, contains a startlingly vivid array of portraits of the Tudor aristocracy. They are, in fact, the first fully achieved portraits of English people. The melancholy truth is that notwithstanding the efforts of all to have followed in Holbein’s wake, from Van Dyck to Reynolds, from Lawrence to Lucian Freud, they have never been bettered.
Many of the most striking works in this exhibition are taken from the rich resource of Holbein’s preparatory sketches preserved in the Royal Library at Windsor. Rarely loaned, because of their vulnerability to prolonged light-exposure, they are small miracles of precise observation. Not since 1983, when they were exhibited at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, has quite such an impressive selection of these works been placed on public display. On that occasion, they stirred Time ’s art citic Robert Hughes to pronounce that “Nobody else got the knobbly mild face of English patrician power so aptly, or saw so clearly the reserves of cunning and toughness veiled by the pink mask.” Hung at Tate Britain on walls the colour of bitter chocolate – an elegant stroke of exhibition design – they are like windows on to the world of the past. They bring the viewer face to face with people who lived and breathed and fought and dreamed and schemed and struggled almost five hundred years ago.
Sir Thomas Elyot , drawn by Holbein, stares impassively into space, his mouth set in an expression of stoic determination. He seems the very image of courtly hauteur and self-possession, although there is also a touching sense of humanity about him, conveyed by the loose strands of tousled hair that complicate the sharp profile of his face, and by the stubble that shadows the line of his jaw. The poet and courtier Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey , gazes directly into the eyes of the artist. Shown full-face, he has a pudding-bowl haircut which he has chosen, judiciously, to set off with a plumed hat. He has sensitive eyes and a look of physical frailty. When Holbein drew him he was sixteen years old. He would be dead by the age of thirty. Sir Thomas Wyatt – another fine but short-lived poet – seems almost to have been surprised in the moment of having his likeness taken. A burly, bearded figure, he glowers at posterity.
All these sitters would have been obliged to wait, in Holbein’s north-facing studio, while the artist went about his work. The encounter would not have been brief, because it takes time to make drawings as brilliant as these. Often, a sense of the sitter’s boredom – the stultification that sets in when one is asked to sit, motionless, for an hour and more – seems palpable. Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton has the glassy-eyed stare of a man who has been hypnotised. Just occasionally, a sitter’s sang-froid remains quite undisturbed by the ordeal. George Neville, 3rd Baron Bergavenny has a face that looks hewn from rock, as impassive as a monument. He has the steely confidence that might be expected of one of Henry VIII’s closest friends and jousting partners and does not look like a man whom it would be sensible to cross. But he is an exception to the rule.
Usually, there is a sense of nerves in the air. Sir John Godsalve, MP for Norwich and a man who held the splendidly titled Office of Common Meter of Precious Tissues, has an expression of wariness bordering on distrust etched into his finely drawn face. A portrait such as this captures not just one man’s likeness but the uneasiness of a whole generation when confronted with the novel experience of having its portrait painted. The sitter watches Holbein watching him; and wonders what kind of magic is being performed. Holbein’s Northern Renaissance predecessors, the Van Eyck brothers, painted with such beguiling realism that they were even accused of sorcery. Perhaps that helps to explain the sense of wonder mingled with suspicion on the faces of Holbein’s English sitters. He was an artist of such skill that he may indeed have struck his clientele as more necromancer than facepainter.
Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) was one of the first truly international artists to live and work in England. He made his first visit to the country in 1526, at a time when he had already travelled to Germany, France and Italy. The outstanding creation of this period was a large-scale portrait of Sir Thomas More and his family, now lost. It is represented at Tate Britain in the form of a superb full-scale pencil sketch, on loan from the Kunstmuseum in Basel, supported by numerous colour drawings of the principal figures. The finished painting must have been both majestic and humane – the image of a hero-scholar, surrounded by those who loved him, in the dark and sparingly furnished interior of his home. It was a mark of Holbein’s own standing that he counted such men as More – who described him as “a wonderful artist” – among his personal friends. He was close, also, to the great humanist Desiderio Erasmus, two portraits of whom have been included in the Tate show. One of these, which has been on long-term loan to the National Gallery from a private collection, may well be familiar to English audiences – the other, perhaps, is less so. It is a small profile portrait of Erasmus, shown writing in an interior, in the profile pose traditionally associated with scholar-saints such as St Jerome. The thinker’s eyes are half-closed, his face radiantly lit, as if illuminated by thought itself. The painting has been loaned by the Louvre, which considers it so precious that it has had to be displayed inside what looks like a case of bulletproof glass.
Erasmus’s friendship with Holbein is likely to have been founded in a sense of intellectual affinity rather than mere fellow-feeling. Each took a similarly radical approach to his own sphere of activity. Erasmus used the new Renaissance humanist science of philology – the study of words, and their history – to set the study of the Bible on an entirely new footing. In the process, by encouraging his contemporaries to read and study Holy Writ for themselves – and, by implication, to challenge the doctrinal status quo – he helped to unleash the forces of Reformation. Unlike Erasmus, Holbein cannot be said to have changed the world in which he lived. But he studied and painted it with the same attention to detail, and the same disregard for received convention, that Erasmus brought to sacred texts. His clear-eyed naturalism is entirely Renaissance in spirit. Like Leonardo da Vinci, who died just a few years before Holbein arrived in England, he was a painter who took nothing for granted.
After his first visit to England, Holbein returned to Basel, where he spent four uneasy years. He had worked as a religious painter but the Reformation’s widespread proscription of sacred art put him out of business. He travelled once more to England, to seek work as court painter to Henry VIII. This time he stayed for good, until his death, late in 1543, which was probably caused by plague.
Certain of his pictures – such as his celebrated allegorical portrait of The Ambassadors , deemed too fragile to travel from its home at the National Gallery – implicitly bemoan the division and strife caused by the Reformation. But others, such as the Allegory of the Old and New Law , painted for an unknown client in London sometime around 1533-5, suggest he was equally capable of articulating pro-Reformation sympathies. There is little sense in attempting to discern the artist’s own affiliations from the iconography of his work. As artist to the Tudor court, Holbein had little alternative but to do as he was told – and as the exhibition indicates, that involved him in tasks ranging from portraiture to the stage-design of court theatricals to the invention of elaborate articles of goldsmithery for the royal table.
But while he assiduously served his English masters, he never seems to have played the lackey. Much of the greatness of his work lies in the way in which it seems to convey more information – and more of the truth – than was actually required by the bare bones of the commission at hand. When Holbein paints Queen Jane Seymour he paints not only her fine clothes, her jewels, and her angular, beady-eyed face; he captures a sense of her isolation and vulnerability. Likewise, when he paints or draws Henry VIII – as he does in the splendid small oil on loan from the Thyssen Collection, as well as in the famous cartoon for the lost Whitehall Mural – he captures not only the self-confidence of England’s most notorious monarch but also his fondness for bullyboy tactics and his positively murderous gift for the darker arts of realpolitik .
Holbein was a remarkable artist who found himself in the right place, at the right time. His legacy was a series of paintings and drawings that now seem like the very stuff of English history, miraculously living relics of a long-dead past. At times, they seem so piercingly truthful that – to paraphrase the Spanish writer Ortega y Gasset’s words about another, later painter, Velazquez – they seem less like art than like actual life perpetuated.
Date: 01-10-2006
Owning Institution: Tate Britain
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2011
Subject:
Renaissance
Tate Britain’s sober but exemplary new exhibition, “Hans Holbein in England”, contains a startlingly vivid array of portraits of the Tudor aristocracy. They are, in fact, the first fully achieved portraits of English people. The melancholy truth is that notwithstanding the efforts of all to have followed in Holbein’s wake, from Van Dyck to Reynolds, from Lawrence to Lucian Freud, they have never been bettered.Many of the most striking works in this exhibition are taken from the rich resource of Holbein’s preparatory sketches preserved in the Royal Library at Windsor. Rarely loaned, because of their vulnerability to prolonged light-exposure, they are small miracles of precise observation. Not since 1983, when they were exhibited at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, has quite such an impressive selection of these works been placed on public display. On that occasion, they stirred Time ’s art citic Robert Hughes to pronounce that “Nobody else got the knobbly mild face of English patrician power so aptly, or saw so clearly the reserves of cunning and toughness veiled by the pink mask.” Hung at Tate Britain on walls the colour of bitter chocolate – an elegant stroke of exhibition design – they are like windows on to the world of the past. They bring the viewer face to face with people who lived and breathed and fought and dreamed and schemed and struggled almost five hundred years ago.
Sir Thomas Elyot , drawn by Holbein, stares impassively into space, his mouth set in an expression of stoic determination. He seems the very image of courtly hauteur and self-possession, although there is also a touching sense of humanity about him, conveyed by the loose strands of tousled hair that complicate the sharp profile of his face, and by the stubble that shadows the line of his jaw. The poet and courtier Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey , gazes directly into the eyes of the artist. Shown full-face, he has a pudding-bowl haircut which he has chosen, judiciously, to set off with a plumed hat. He has sensitive eyes and a look of physical frailty. When Holbein drew him he was sixteen years old. He would be dead by the age of thirty. Sir Thomas Wyatt – another fine but short-lived poet – seems almost to have been surprised in the moment of having his likeness taken. A burly, bearded figure, he glowers at posterity.
All these sitters would have been obliged to wait, in Holbein’s north-facing studio, while the artist went about his work. The encounter would not have been brief, because it takes time to make drawings as brilliant as these. Often, a sense of the sitter’s boredom – the stultification that sets in when one is asked to sit, motionless, for an hour and more – seems palpable. Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton has the glassy-eyed stare of a man who has been hypnotised. Just occasionally, a sitter’s sang-froid remains quite undisturbed by the ordeal. George Neville, 3rd Baron Bergavenny has a face that looks hewn from rock, as impassive as a monument. He has the steely confidence that might be expected of one of Henry VIII’s closest friends and jousting partners and does not look like a man whom it would be sensible to cross. But he is an exception to the rule.
Usually, there is a sense of nerves in the air. Sir John Godsalve, MP for Norwich and a man who held the splendidly titled Office of Common Meter of Precious Tissues, has an expression of wariness bordering on distrust etched into his finely drawn face. A portrait such as this captures not just one man’s likeness but the uneasiness of a whole generation when confronted with the novel experience of having its portrait painted. The sitter watches Holbein watching him; and wonders what kind of magic is being performed. Holbein’s Northern Renaissance predecessors, the Van Eyck brothers, painted with such beguiling realism that they were even accused of sorcery. Perhaps that helps to explain the sense of wonder mingled with suspicion on the faces of Holbein’s English sitters. He was an artist of such skill that he may indeed have struck his clientele as more necromancer than facepainter.
Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) was one of the first truly international artists to live and work in England. He made his first visit to the country in 1526, at a time when he had already travelled to Germany, France and Italy. The outstanding creation of this period was a large-scale portrait of Sir Thomas More and his family, now lost. It is represented at Tate Britain in the form of a superb full-scale pencil sketch, on loan from the Kunstmuseum in Basel, supported by numerous colour drawings of the principal figures. The finished painting must have been both majestic and humane – the image of a hero-scholar, surrounded by those who loved him, in the dark and sparingly furnished interior of his home. It was a mark of Holbein’s own standing that he counted such men as More – who described him as “a wonderful artist” – among his personal friends. He was close, also, to the great humanist Desiderio Erasmus, two portraits of whom have been included in the Tate show. One of these, which has been on long-term loan to the National Gallery from a private collection, may well be familiar to English audiences – the other, perhaps, is less so. It is a small profile portrait of Erasmus, shown writing in an interior, in the profile pose traditionally associated with scholar-saints such as St Jerome. The thinker’s eyes are half-closed, his face radiantly lit, as if illuminated by thought itself. The painting has been loaned by the Louvre, which considers it so precious that it has had to be displayed inside what looks like a case of bulletproof glass.
Erasmus’s friendship with Holbein is likely to have been founded in a sense of intellectual affinity rather than mere fellow-feeling. Each took a similarly radical approach to his own sphere of activity. Erasmus used the new Renaissance humanist science of philology – the study of words, and their history – to set the study of the Bible on an entirely new footing. In the process, by encouraging his contemporaries to read and study Holy Writ for themselves – and, by implication, to challenge the doctrinal status quo – he helped to unleash the forces of Reformation. Unlike Erasmus, Holbein cannot be said to have changed the world in which he lived. But he studied and painted it with the same attention to detail, and the same disregard for received convention, that Erasmus brought to sacred texts. His clear-eyed naturalism is entirely Renaissance in spirit. Like Leonardo da Vinci, who died just a few years before Holbein arrived in England, he was a painter who took nothing for granted.
After his first visit to England, Holbein returned to Basel, where he spent four uneasy years. He had worked as a religious painter but the Reformation’s widespread proscription of sacred art put him out of business. He travelled once more to England, to seek work as court painter to Henry VIII. This time he stayed for good, until his death, late in 1543, which was probably caused by plague.
Certain of his pictures – such as his celebrated allegorical portrait of The Ambassadors , deemed too fragile to travel from its home at the National Gallery – implicitly bemoan the division and strife caused by the Reformation. But others, such as the Allegory of the Old and New Law , painted for an unknown client in London sometime around 1533-5, suggest he was equally capable of articulating pro-Reformation sympathies. There is little sense in attempting to discern the artist’s own affiliations from the iconography of his work. As artist to the Tudor court, Holbein had little alternative but to do as he was told – and as the exhibition indicates, that involved him in tasks ranging from portraiture to the stage-design of court theatricals to the invention of elaborate articles of goldsmithery for the royal table.
But while he assiduously served his English masters, he never seems to have played the lackey. Much of the greatness of his work lies in the way in which it seems to convey more information – and more of the truth – than was actually required by the bare bones of the commission at hand. When Holbein paints Queen Jane Seymour he paints not only her fine clothes, her jewels, and her angular, beady-eyed face; he captures a sense of her isolation and vulnerability. Likewise, when he paints or draws Henry VIII – as he does in the splendid small oil on loan from the Thyssen Collection, as well as in the famous cartoon for the lost Whitehall Mural – he captures not only the self-confidence of England’s most notorious monarch but also his fondness for bullyboy tactics and his positively murderous gift for the darker arts of realpolitik .
Holbein was a remarkable artist who found himself in the right place, at the right time. His legacy was a series of paintings and drawings that now seem like the very stuff of English history, miraculously living relics of a long-dead past. At times, they seem so piercingly truthful that – to paraphrase the Spanish writer Ortega y Gasset’s words about another, later painter, Velazquez – they seem less like art than like actual life perpetuated.
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