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Assessment/reputation Bourbon Apelles quote

His works have been called "pictorial documents" of the ideas of his time.

|Description=Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling, probably Anne Lovell. National Gallery, London.

he painted the portraits of courtiers such as Sir Henry Guildford and his wife Lady Mary, and of Anne Lovell, recently identified as the subject of Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling.

• King, David J. "Who was Holbein's lady with a squirrel and a starling?". Apollo 159, 507, May, 2004: 165–75. Rpt. on bnet.com. Retrieved 27 November 2008.

Extras

The key to Holbein's artistic success was his mastery of outline, which enabled him to work both quickly and powerfully in all genres, from the portrait to decorative design. His fluid draughtmanship displays not only expressive energy but clarity and balance. He applied this skill equally to fantastic satire and to realistic portraiture. The Dance of Death has earned him a reputation as one of the great satirical artists. Holbein's painting style was a direct extension of his drawing, but he also developed a virtuoso technique for rendering varied textures and fabrics, such as the velvet, brocade, and ermine in The Ambassadors.

John North calls Holbein's drawings, most of which are in the collection in the Royal Library, Windsor, "one of the most vivid records of a royal court ever assembled". Even when Holbein’s portraits are of unidentified sitters, they are, in North’s view, "as real as the people we pass in the street every day".

Techniques

Holbein always made highly detailed pencil drawings of his portrait subjects, often supplemented with ink and coloured chalk. The drawings emphasize facial detail and usually did not include the hands; clothing was only indicated schematically. The outlines of these drawings were then transferred onto the support for the final painting using tiny holes in the paper through which powdered charcoal was transmitted; in later years Holbein used a kind of carbon paper. The final paintings thus had the same scale as the original drawings. Although the drawings were made as studies for paintings, they stand on their own as independent works of art. How many portraits have been lost can be seen from Holbein's book (nearly all pages in the Royal Collection) containing preparatory drawings for portraits - of eighty-five drawings, only a handful have surviving Holbein paintings, though often copies have survived.