Hans Holbein the Younger valuation
The portrait painter of Henry VIII's court, whose drawings and The Ambassadors fixed the image of Tudor England.
Hans Holbein the Younger (about 1497–1543) was born in Augsburg, the son of the painter Hans Holbein the Elder, and made his name in Basel, painting portraits of the scholar Erasmus and designing woodcuts, among them the Dance of Death.
What a work by Hans Holbein the Younger is worth
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Bio
Hans Holbein the Younger (about 1497–1543) was born in Augsburg, the son of the painter Hans Holbein the Elder, and made his name in Basel, painting portraits of the scholar Erasmus and designing woodcuts, among them the Dance of Death. He first came to England in 1526 with an introduction from Erasmus to Thomas More, whose household he painted, and settled in London in 1532. By 1536 he was working for Henry VIII, whose image he fixed in a great mural at Whitehall Palace, lost in a fire in 1698, of which part of the full-size cartoon survives in the National Portrait Gallery. The Ambassadors, of 1533, is in the National Gallery, and the Royal Collection at Windsor holds a celebrated group of his portrait drawings of the Tudor court.
Holbein's portraits of Henry VIII and his court were copied again and again, in his workshop, by English painters of the following decades and for country houses for centuries after, so most Tudor portraits in the manner of Holbein are later versions, and the question is when and by whom they were painted. Tree-ring dating of the oak panels has become central to that question, since it can show whether a panel was cut in Holbein's lifetime or long after. His portrait miniatures are extremely rare and much imitated. The Dance of Death and his other designs for woodcuts, cut by Hans Lützelburger and printed in many editions, are the most accessible of his works, and early impressions are told from later ones by the text and the state of the blocks.
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