Date: 28-04-1992
Owning Institution: National Gallery
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999      
Subject:   Renaissance    

THE lady in the white fur hat sat for her portrait in a quiet, well lit room somewhere in London one day in 1426 or 1427. There may have been little conversation between her and the artist. She was a lady of the court of Henry VIII and he, as a painter, would in those days have been regarded as a craftsman. He may have occasionally instructed her to move her head or hands, but the main sound in the room was probably that of his physical activity: the busy scratching of chalk on paper; the intermittent whisper of fingers rubbing the image to establish tone. She would have had plenty of time to wonder how the likeness would turn out.

The drawing Holbein made that day has not survived, although the painting for which it was the essen-tial preparatory work has. He added certain things: the blue background, on which he has inscribed a deli-cate, almost abstract tracery of vine leaves and tendrils; the squirrel that the sitter holds; the starling perched on a branch next to her. The squirrel and bird may once have held some significance, perhaps heraldic, but the information might not add much to the picture, whose strength lies in its dedication to a particular ideal of truthfulness. Holbein's portrait is not one of those paintings of a person that encourage you to admire the artist's inventiveness, his flattering transformation (as in the case, say, of a Van Dyck) of his subject. A young woman, neither particularly beautiful nor ugly, gazes away to her left. She seems withdrawn, a touch melancholic. The immediacy of the painting is, still, startling.

The woman's name is no longer known, so she has become A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling. It is one of the ironies of history that the painter's aristocratic subject should have become anonymous, her dis-tinction subsumed within the fame of her former employee. These days, she is ''a Holbein''. Not just any Holbein, but the most expensive of his paintings ever to have been purchased by a British museum. The National Gallery has committed several years of its annual purchase grant to her acquisition. She is a woman with a price on her head. When you look at her, you are also looking at some pounds 12 million of public money.

Many people will doubtless wonder whether she was worth it. It is certainly hard to disagree too vehe-mently with someone who argues that the money would have been better spent on, say, the new wing of a hospital for sick children. But it may be more sensible to ask whether, given that the National Gallery has a budget for acquisitions, its trustees were wise to spend so much on this particular painting. Even this ques-tion cannot be properly answered until it is known what other pictures - pictures that have not yet come on to the market - the National Gallery will have to forgo as a result of its commitment to the Holbein.

What can be said is that A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling is a great portrait and an extremely sig-nificant addition to the National Gallery. It is quite distinct from the two Holbeins already in the collection, both of which are somewhat untypical of his oeuvre. Its presence at the National Gallery means that the country's first museum can give a much clearer account both of the nature of Holbein's importance and of the way in which he changed the face (literally) of English art.

The National Gallery's two other Holbeins depict foreign sitters and do so with fairly unusual intentions. The Ambassadors, that world-famous image of two French envoys set among allegorical bric-a-brac, is a complex masterpiece whose precise meaning may never be unravelled. The prominent lute with its broken string, ancient symbol of discord, combines with the presence of Lutheran texts and the renowned anamor-phically indistinct skull to suggest the doctrinal leanings and profound religious concerns of Holbein's sitters. It records a moment of religious crisis in the West - a moment when man's salvation from death through faith seemed, itself, to be threatened by rifts within the church. And while Holbein's Christina of Denmark, which was painted to show Henry VIII what one of his potential brides looked like, is a female portrait, it has little else in common with A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling. It is a painting whose subject colludes with the fact of her own display. It lacks the modesty and the sense of involuntary self- revelation you find in the portrait of the anonymous Englishwoman.

It is an odd fact that no English museum should have owned, until now, an example of the relatively small-scale portraits which constituted the large majority of Holbein's output during the half of his life that he spent in this country. It is hard to understate the impact these paintings must have had on the English court in the second quarter of the sixteenth century. Before Holbein there existed no tradition, in England, of por-traits painted from the life. Then, suddenly, this German artist appeared who not only painted from the life but did so more faithfully and minutely than virtually any other artist in history. By the time he died, he had painted roughly a fifth of Henry VIII's entire court circle. No wonder he was in demand: Holbein was the artist who showed the English what they looked like. He showed them the difference between the self seen by the self in the mirror, and the self seen by another.

The distant, reticent gaze of Holbein's Lady with a Squirrel may partly be explained by etiquette. But there may be more to the lady's reticence than the courtly requirements of female modesty. She looks frozen as well as distant, as if she is holding her breath. Her immobility seems charged with something almost like apprehension. Holbein has painted her awareness of being painted. In doing so, he has registered the uneasiness of an entire generation to whom the sensation of having a likeness taken was a new and not entirely comfortable experience. You still sense here the old occult power of the image.

Holbein's realism is of a different order to that of just about every other artist before or since his time, although when people express their sense of this they tend to sound rather like Erasmus writing to Sir Tho-mas More about Holbein's portrait of him: ''I should scarcely be able to see you better if I were with you.'' In the case of Holbein, such remarks have been repeated with such frequency that they have acquired a more than conventional force. And it is true that you do feel, as the cliche goes, as if you are in the same room with Holbein's lady with a squirrel; she seems to be there in a way that the subjects of other great Renaissance portraitists like Titian do not.

This can partly be accounted for by what might be described as Holbein's realism, but is better thought of as his rhetoric of honesty. Holbein does not seem to have idealised his sitter in any way, although that is not to say that he has been purely objective. Holbein made a deliberate choice when he decided not to make her conform to any of the established canons of female beauty. It may not be entirely fanciful to find, in the slightly protuberant nose, unpronounced mouth and small chin of his sitter, a certain type of face which is, still, peculiarly English.

Holbein's persuasiveness is inseparable from his technique, which has something in common with that of the miniaturist, but also tends to fluctuate between hard minuteness and subtle generalisation. His brush-strokes are so closely adapted to what they depict that you can get extremely close to his paintings and still read them, totally coherently, as description. A Titian, once you get close to it, invites you to read it, instead, as a painting. It discloses the visual mechanics - the brush-strokes - that make it so convincing from a certain distance. So as you get closer to the painting, there is a sense in which you retreat from its subject. But Holbein almost abolishes this dialogue between subject and image, which means that getting closer to a Holbein is very like getting closer to a person. To inspect his Lady with a Squirrel from as close as six inches away is, extraordinarily, to receive more not less information about her: it is to note the degree of moistness of the skin, the barely perceptible bluishness of the temples. How this was done remains unclear.

There is nothing flashy about the Lady with a Squirrel but it does display a form of subtle exhibitionism. Holbein has deliberately made things difficult for himself and, in overcoming self- imposed problems, has revealed his virtuosity. The painting incorporates a striking breadth of visual effects. Different forms of reflection, for instance, ranging from the dull sheen of a grey metal chain and the muted lights in the sitter's fingernails to the delicate limpidity of her gaze and the twinkle in the squirrel's eye. A similar range is to be found in the painting's handling of textures, from the fine translucency of thin silk to the creamy opacity of the linen shawl and the modulated darks of dress and sleeve.

Within this broader play on texture there is a play on varieties of hair and fur. The lady's fur hat is painted in a blend of tiny, discrete marks and more general tonal passages; her hair is painted, with the finest brushes, as a multitude of single strands; the squirrel's fur is painted just a little more coarsely. Holbein has also created a clever visual pun by making the end of the squirrel's tail protrude slightly above the line of the lady's bodice. Silhouetted, it assumes the shape of the rounded tip of a paint-brush: a symbol, perhaps, of the act of painting that created this image; a witty reminder, from Holbein, that this apparent miracle of verisimilitude is in truth the product of his craft.

The squirrel's tail / paint-brush is, also, somewhat suggestively placed. There is something slightly ir-reverent about this detail, with its suggestion of what Frank Auerbach once termed ''the haptic nature'' of painting - the sense in which to paint someone is to touch them, if only with your eyes. Holbein was aware that to take someone's likeness is to assume a certain power over them: it is to create them over again, to preserve your reinvention of them for posterity. The employee knew that he was, secretly, the master.