Hans Holbein: The Power of Portraits in the Tudor Court

When the German painter Hans Holbein arrived in England in the late 1520s, carrying a letter of introduction from Erasmus, he encountered an art scene that was, by European standards, provincial. What followed was one of the most remarkable careers in Renaissance painting. Court painter to Henry VIII, Holbein gave the Tudor dynasty its enduring visual identity — the wide-legged stance, the watchful eyes, the almost terrifying authority. This final talk explores what Holbein’s career in England reveals about the relationship between art and power, image-making and propaganda, and the astonishing ambition of one of the Renaissance’s supreme portrait painters.