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. Dr James Fox, A Very British Renaissance, BBC 2014
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.
Look how he [Henry VII] stands – like a Tudor gunslinger at Ye OK Corral ... This is a king who could change history ... The widest king in Christendom. Waldemar Januszczak, Holbein: Eye of the Tudors – A Culture Show Special, BBC 2015
A genius who looked like a farmer. ibid.
He left behind some of the greatest portraiture of the Renaissance. 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