Hans Holbein the Younger was a German painter, born in Augsburg around 1497, who trained in Basel and spent his last years in London as King's Painter to Henry VIII. He died there in 1543. He is remembered for the faces of the Tudor court, for a lost wall painting of Henry VIII, and for The Ambassadors, a double portrait with a distorted skull on the floor.
Much of what people picture when they think of Henry VIII's court comes from Holbein's portraits and drawings. The best known of them, the king standing with his legs apart, no longer exists in Holbein's own hand.
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In 1537 Holbein painted Henry VIII full length on a wall of the Privy Chamber at Whitehall Palace, standing with his father Henry VII, his mother Elizabeth of York and his new queen, Jane Seymour. The king looked so alive, the Royal Collection notes, that it shocked those who saw it.
The wall itself is gone. A fire destroyed the palace in 1698, and what survives is a copy made in 1667 by Remigius van Leemput, along with Holbein's own full size drawing for the left half, now in the National Portrait Gallery. In the finished painting Holbein turned the king's head toward the viewer, a harder gaze than the one in the drawing.
The most famous Tudor image, then, rests on a copyist and a sheet of paper. It is not the only Holbein picture whose familiar story has drifted away from the evidence, and the rest of his life holds other places where the two part ways.
What You'll Discover
What a dead Christ did to Dostoevsky.
Whose door Erasmus opened for him.
What stretches across the floor of The Ambassadors.
Where Anne of Cleves was really painted.
Who kept the drawings after he died.