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Artist

Hans Holbein the Younger

Year
Augusta 1497 - 1543 London
Price range
1,000,000 – 3,000,000 USD +
Hans Holbein’s portraits are the perfect record of the court of the English king Henry VIII, indeed any court of the Renaissance. He has an unflinching eye for the intelligence, wealth, power, and sometimes beauty of his sitters.

One of the most exquisite draftsmen of all time (most of his drawings remain in the Royal Collection), Holbein’s painstaking attention to rendering the textures and details of velvets, silks, furs, feathers, needlework, and leather are illusionistic miracles. Animals, plants, and decorative objects, especially jewelry, likewise fascinated the artist; typically, such items refer to events or concerns in the sitter’s life, while others act as attributes of the sitter’s occupation, character, family connections, or aspirations. Holbein’s humanist formation and innate inventiveness doubtless provided ample fodder for such allusions.

Holbein was born in Augsburg in southern Germany, the son of a successful painter, Hans Holbein the Elder (ca. 1465–1524). Yet the ambitious artist chiefly sought opportunities outside the German territories, spending much of his career abroad. In 1515 Holbein moved with his family to Basel in Switzerland, a university town and center of the new book printing industry. There he became acquainted with humanist scholars, Erasmus of Rotterdam in particular, who became a key patron. Animated pen drawings in the margins of a copy of Erasmus’s satirical Praise of Folly are amongst Holbein’s earliest works, along with a portrait of Erasmus (1523–24, Musée du Louvre, Paris), his first major portrait. During this period, he produced two extraordinary religious works, Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521, Kunstmuseum Basel) and the Family of Burgomaster Meyer Adoring the Virgin (1526, private collection).

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Selected artworks
Market

Top 3 auction prices

1,245,260 $
2015
1,372,812 $
2022
1,481,424 $
2015

Details

No fully attributed painting by Holbein has appeared in auction. The sales are: Sotheby’s London – 9 December 2015 lot 8 (821,000 GBP; catalogued as ‘workshop of Hans Holbein the Younger’), Christie’s London – 8 December 2022 lot 3 (1,122,000 GBP, catalogued as ‘Hans Holbein the Younger and workshop’), and Sotheby’s London – 8 July 2015 lot 7 (965,000 GBP; catalogued as ‘workshop of Hans Holbein the Younger’).
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Further Reading

Kate Heard, Holbein at the Tudor Court, London, 2023.

Anne Woollett, ed., Holbein: Capturing Character, exh. cat., Los Angeles, 2021.

Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal Griener, Hans Holbein, London, 2014.

Stephanie Buck, et al., Hans Holbein the Younger: Painter at the Court of Henry VIII, exh. cat., London, 2003.

Mark Roskill and John Oliver Hand, eds., Hans Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and Reception, Washington and New Haven, 2001.

John Rowlands, Holbein: The Paintings of Hans Holbein the Younger, New York, 1985.

K. T. Parker, The Drawings of Hans Holbein in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, London, 1983.

Roy Strong, Holbein and Henry VIII, London, 1967.

Notable Exhibitions

London, Buckingham Palace, Holbein at the Tudor Court, 10 November 2023 –14 April 2024. Curated by Kate Heard.

Frankfurt-am-Main, Städel Museum, Holbein and the Renaissance in the North, 2 November 2023 – 18 February 2024; travelled to Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, 19 March – 30 June, 2024. Curated by Jochen Sander.

Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, Holbein: Capturing Character in the Renaissance, 19 October 2021 – 9 January 2022; travelled to Morgan Library & Museum, New York, 11 February – 15 May 2022. Curated by Anne Woollett.

London, Tate Britain, Holbein in England, 28 September 2006 –7 January 2007. Curated by Susan Foister.

Basel, Kunstmuseum Basel, Hans Holbein the Younger: the Basel Years, 1515–1532, 1 April – 2 July 2006. Curated by Christian Müller.

The Hague, Mauritshuis, Hans Holbein the Younger, 1497/98–1543: Portraitist of the Renaissance, 16 August – 16 November 2003. Curated by Stephanie Buck and Jochen Sander.

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