It’s an irony to savour: the man who invented the Tudors was a German. If Henry VIII, his wives and courtiers exercise a stronger hold on the public imagination than their Plantagenet precursors or Stuart successors, it is because we can all picture them so clearly. That, in turn, is due to an extraordinary sequence of portraits and drawings produced between the late 1520s and early 1540s by Hans Holbein of Augsburg (c 1497–1543), many of which have become instantly recognisable. This familiarity, as Elizabeth Goldring notes at the outset of her superb and ground-breaking biography, means it is harder to appreciate just how novel Holbein’s portraits appeared to the first people who saw them. They marvelled, even more than we do, at Holbein’s ability to make viewers feel that they have been ‘granted access to the sitter’s inner thoughts and feelings, that Holbein has distilled the essence of the sitter’s nature and temperament in visual form’.

That Holbein is remembered as a portraitist is partly a reflection of modern artistic priorities, biased towards painting. One of the merits of Goldring’s appraisal is the attention she pays to Holbein’s other cultural output: book illustrations, window schemes, sets for court festivities and various forms of metalwork – there are hundreds of surviving designs for jewellery and utensils.

Holbein’s arc towards portraiture was nonetheless a reflection of the times. Having migrated to the Swiss city of Basel in his youth, he specialised in the production of altarpieces for local churches until, with the arrival of Protestant reform, the market for devotional imagery dried up. In 1526, Holbein travelled to England with a letter of introduction from Basel’s most famous resident, Erasmus, to his English friend Thomas More. Portraits of the More family and other notables brought Holbein to the attention of the court, and he was commissioned to produce a painting of Henry VIII triumphing over the French for the Banqueting House at Greenwich – an earlier involvement with the projection of Tudor power, Goldring notes, than is usually acknowledged.

Basel, meanwhile, was becoming a still less congenial milieu. Holbein’s return coincided with a destructive episode of iconoclasm and in 1532 he came back to England, gravitating from the circle of Thomas More to that of Thomas Cromwell and eventually into royal service as (by 1538) salaried painter to the king. It’s a trajectory that traverses the tricky question of whether the Reformation was good or bad for the visual arts. How Holbein himself felt is far from clear. Goldring suspects his religious sympathies were conservative rather than radical, but this did not affect decisions about work and commissions. Evidence for Holbein’s personal life is remarkably sparse, yet Goldring succeeds in creating a compelling biographical picture from archival fragments and information gleaned from the artworks themselves.

Her subject emerges as a relentless pragmatist, willing at the drop of a brush to change artistic direction or abandon sinking patrons for rising ones. Abandoned, too, were a wife, two sons and two daughters in Basel; we know from Holbein’s hastily drafted will of another two children from a relationship with a woman in England. Yet Goldring insists that Holbein’s English career cannot be understood without reference to his experiences in Switzerland. There was, she demonstrates, more travel back and forth than previously realised. 

Holbein was a ‘workaholic’, a perfectionist who littered preparatory drawings with annotations, who relished the challenge of new materials and techniques and proved a master of creative adaptation. One of many sparkling insights is how much his ‘secular’ commissions owed to the conventions of sacred art: Holbein’s famous group portrait of the More household evokes depictions of the ‘holy kindred’ – Jesus surrounded by his extended family – while a painting of Henry VIII attended by members of the Barber-Surgeons’ Company echoes the donor portraiture of medieval altarpieces. Holbein, Goldring argues, was a craftsman rather than an ‘artist’ in the modern sense. In contrast to his contemporary Albrecht Dürer, or later admirer Nicholas Hilliard, there are few signs of an attempt to cultivate an image as a practitioner of a liberal art, or of efforts to assert a place among the genteel and educated. Goldring firmly scotches the notion that Holbein was a ‘friend’ of either Erasmus or More; he was an employee, albeit a talented one.

There is another irony: Holbein created the enduring image of Henry VIII, but only one surviving portrait of the king (in the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid) is unquestionably his work. It shows Henry in three-quarter pose, rather than the combative full-face stance Holbein employed for a mural at Whitehall Palace, an image much copied before its destruction by fire in the 17th century. ‘Lost’ Holbeins are a recurrent theme, and Goldring brilliantly draws connections between surviving works, those we know to have been produced and those whose creation we can reasonably conjecture. 

The painting of Thomas More in the Frick Collection is generally regarded as a solitary masterpiece, but Goldring convincingly argues that Holbein produced multiple portraits of More, just as his workshop seems to have churned out likenesses of Erasmus on an almost industrial scale. The More family portrait was another work eventually destroyed by fire, imaginable from later copies and from a detailed preliminary drawing. The latter is usually thought to have been sent as a gift from the Mores to Erasmus, yet Goldring shows that what was actually presented was very likely another finished version in oils, completed after Holbein’s return to Basel. Suggestions that Holbein painted (now lost) portraits of Anne Boleyn and of her daughter, the infant Elizabeth, also carry conviction.

Other claims are speculative, but usually credible and never less than intriguing. Holbein’s miniatures of Thomas More’s daughter Margaret and her husband, William Roper, were, Goldring thinks, originally intended as gifts for More in the Tower. She suggests that Holbein served as an intelligence gatherer for Cromwell on a 1533 visit to Basel and may have accompanied an ambassadorial mission to Wittenberg in 1535, when Henry VIII was putting out feelers to Luther’s ally Melanchthon. Holbein was certainly a diplomatic asset for Henry in 1538–9, when he was sent abroad to capture likenesses of prospective brides. Contrary to enduring myth, there is no evidence that his portrait of Anne of Cleves was deliberately misleading, or that Henry held a grudge about it.

Even an admiring reviewer is obliged to point out some minor errors. Cromwell was not yet ‘Sir Thomas’ on Holbein’s return to England in 1532. Zwingli did not die on the eve of civil war in Switzerland, but was killed in the opening battle. Nicholas Melton, plebeian leader of the 1536 Lincolnshire Rebellion, was not ‘a former monk’. Nor is it true that no one in England was burned at the stake during Cardinal Wolsey’s chancellorship (over a dozen Lollards were). I am unconvinced that More’s resignation as chancellor in 1532 was ‘an act of public defiance’; rather, he was pushed into it, and the parting with Henry was, for the moment, amicable. The observation that More had a set of stocks erected in his home ‘for use as an instrument of torture’ seems overblown. Stocks were a common method of restraint in the Tudor criminal justice system; as a Justice of the Peace, More was entitled to detain suspected heretics at his house.

Only rarely does Goldring miss an art-historical trick. She might, however, have pointed out an intriguing difference between the Frick portrait of Thomas More and the family portrait. In both, More wears a chain of office, made up of linked letter ‘S’s, signifying service. In the drawing, however, the letters are reversed – perhaps a wry or satirical comment by More, who micromanaged the commission, on the ultimate futility of worldly achievement.

A copy of the lost family portrait was made in the 1590s by Rowland Lockey. Goldring thinks Lockey may have ‘Protestantised’ this for an Elizabethan audience: ‘it is difficult to imagine More instructing Holbein to remove his daughter’s prayerbeads.’ I’m not so sure. The rosaries are likewise missing from a second, explicitly Catholic version commissioned from Lockey by More’s descendants, who themselves appear in the picture sporting pendant crucifixes. Changes in emphasis between the extant drawing and the lost portrait, from a family at prayer to an ideal of the humanist household, were most likely at More’s own direction.

There will doubtless continue to be debate about Holbein’s achievements, particularly around such perplexing works as The Ambassadors (1533), of which Goldring provides a sensible and illuminating account. But it is hard to imagine how this biography could be bettered – it is bold without being eccentric, unfailingly alert to context and possibility, and entertainingly readable throughout. The book itself is a thing of beauty, adorned with over 250 high-quality and meticulously placed colour illustrations. It is a work of craftsmanship of which Holbein himself might have approved.