HOLBEIN AND HIS TIME MACHINE

 HOLBEIN  AND HIS TIME MACHINE

Holbein was from Bavaria and born in 1497. His father was a painter and a really good one. Holbein was maybe the greatest  artist of his time and maybe one of the greatest of any time.His main claim to fame is that he  immortalised Henry the Eighth and his world. Without Holbein Henry might well be someone we just heard about like his Father but not the Henry we know.

 In the National Portrait Gallery, there is an early painting of Henry. It is based on, let's say, reality and  later there was the full-size propaganda-style and iconic painting of Henry standing legs apart in the way everyone remembers him, the smaller painting is Holbein at his best because what he did best was telling us about the soul of the personality. We can tell from these two paintings that Holbein painted what he felt (the smaller painting) and what he was ordered to do (the big painting).

As said we know everything about the world of Henry because of Holbein. He didn't just describe Tudor England but he immortalised the period. By immortalising it he made it (maybe) that part of history that we can really visualise unlike the pages from a history book. These we cannot envisage at all. So for me, it is a real lesson.

 When I first went to the three big galleries in London the thing that really impressed me as an eight-year-old kid was how real Holbein was, not his paintings but his drawings. Why? Because as my teacher at university Gombrich said: " a  painting can be laborious but a drawing is quick and immediate it shows us the soul." 

He went to Basle and started painting for book producers and did religious art. He produced some funny drawings for Erasmus and his satirical book on the clergy "In Praise Of Folly". But the publishing began to flounder and so Holbein needed work and with a letter from Erasmus got to England. England was not interested in the world of the Madonna, they were interested in portraits. He met Thomas Moore and lived in his house while painting a massive family portrait of Moore plus another of Moore on his own. Holbein's painting of Moore was new, not just in British art but anywhere. It shows Moore as a driven personality searching for something. This is why when we look at a painting its interesting to know what else was being done.

 Moore was the famous man of Henry who would not buckle down to Henry's want of a divorce. He was beheaded. . The painters first visit lasted two years and he went back to Basle. It was a place of religious fanatics where iconoclasts smashed up the churches. They destroyed nearly everything including anything Holbein. The Lutheran iconoclasts were a group who wanted a world without an image.

 Holbein was born a catholic and seems to have kept his faith through the years but without showing it. When he went back to London he worked in Steelyard Passage an area designated for German merchants, it was a mini world for Germans. The painter lived through the period when Henry was ravaging the structure of English religion and creating his own church. He gives us the idea of raging bull Henry and that piggy eyed Thomas Cromwell ready to destroy a huge chunk of art as he contemplates his destruction of the churches. And here we can ask does he tell us something through his painting that we couldn't know from words. I think he does. 

But Holbein wasn't just a painter at court, he designed everything possible to design for the court. Nevertheless, his chief duty was to paint Henry as a weapon of propaganda, he painted him on various occasions but they do not reveal.

 Holbein was no longer in the business of telling the truth but painting in that   Mao Tse Tung manor, big and huge, boring and meaningless, unimportant apart from its historical reference. 

With Henry needing another wife he was sent to paint pictures of possibles. Welcome to the Hans Holbein dating agency. 

His lightning-fast fingers drew up a lot of women that Henry could view. Finally, he found Anne of Cleves while scouting Europe. Henry saw the painting, liked it but when Anne arrived to be married Henry said she smelt so much that sex was out of the question. The marriage was never consummated and Thomas Cromwell beheaded as he was blamed for this woman. After all, he was the one who said Ann looked cool.

 His most famous painting apart from Henry is the Ambassadors. He died of the plague in 1545 and his fame lies in his "big " paintings but for me, it is, as I said, his drawings, which were his greatest achievements, without doubt for me.