Much of what people picture when they think of Henry VIII's England comes from the hand of one German painter, Hans Holbein the Younger. Born in Augsburg around 1497 or 1498, he trained in Basel and spent his last years in London as King's Painter to Henry VIII, dying there in 1543.
He left the faces of the Tudor court, a lost wall painting of the king, and The Ambassadors, a double portrait with a distorted skull stretched across the floor. The best known image of Henry, standing with his legs apart, no longer survives in Holbein's own hand.
The court that made his name was also a dangerous place. Jane Seymour, the queen he set beside the king on that wall, died within months, and Thomas Cromwell, the minister behind another royal match, was executed on Tower Hill.
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Holbein grew up among painters. His father, Hans Holbein the Elder, ran a large workshop in Augsburg, and his older brother Ambrosius learned the same trade.
By 1515 the young man was working in Basel, a Swiss city on the Rhine and a center of learning and printing, and Ambrosius joined him there. He designed woodcuts and book illustrations for the printers, and on September 25, 1519, he was admitted as a master to the city's painters' guild.
A dead Christ in Basel
The picture that grew most famous from Holbein's years in Basel is a dead Christ painted in 1521. More than three centuries later, it would find its way into one of the great Russian novels.
What You'll Discover
What a dead Christ did to Dostoevsky.
Who welcomed him in England on Erasmus's word.
What stretches across the floor of The Ambassadors.
Where Anne of Cleves was really painted.
Who kept the drawings after he died.