Artists of the Tudor court

• 1. Introduction

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  Artists of the Tudor court shaped how England's most powerful dynasty chose to be seen. Between 1485 and 1603, from the accession of Henry VII to the death of Elizabeth I, the painters and limners who worked for England's Tudor monarchs and their courtiers produced some of the most recognizable images in European history. Yet the world those artists inhabited was strange and precarious in equal measure. Most of them were foreigners. Many arrived not knowing how long they would stay. A few never left. What drove these painters from the Low Countries, Germany, Italy, and France to an island at the edge of Europe? What did the Tudor monarchs actually want from them? And what happened to the vast majority of work they made, work that has vanished so completely that its existence must be inferred from drawings, receipts, and second-hand accounts? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer. The journey begins with a kingdom that had almost lost the habit of art, and ends with a queen who reportedly had her own portraits burned.

• 2. A Kingdom Without Artists

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  By 1485, English art outside of architecture had reached, by one assessment, a very low ebb. The Wars of the Roses had disrupted artistic activity so thoroughly that the Yorkist dynasty, overthrown by the first Tudor, had been reduced to sending its diplomats abroad to have their portraits painted. Edward Grimston sat for Petrus Christus, and Sir John Donne for Hans Memling; both of those paintings are now in the National Gallery in London. Neither was painted on English soil. The new Tudor regime inherited this cultural deficit and responded with a policy of recruitment. Foreign artists were welcomed, sometimes lavishly, to a court that understood it needed outside expertise. England was not alone in this; artistically marginal kingdoms across Europe, from Spain to Naples, pursued the same strategy. What made the Tudor case distinctive was how long the dependency lasted. Netherlandish painters remained predominant across most of the dynasty's span, and French influence shaped two of the most important figures in English portrait miniature tradition.

• 3. The Portrait as Power

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  Hans Holbein the Younger kept a book of preparatory drawings, nearly all of which are now in the Royal Collection. It contained eighty-five drawings made for portraits. Of those eighty-five, only a handful have surviving Holbein paintings to show for them. Copies survive in some cases, but the originals are gone. That ratio gives a sense of how much has been lost and how central portrait painting was to everyone working at the Tudor court. With religious painting all but eliminated by the Reformation, and classical mythology holding little interest until the reign's very end, portraiture was the dominant form. It ranged from the informal miniature, painted from life over the course of a few days and kept for private contemplation, to the large-scale symbolic images of Elizabeth I such as the Rainbow Portrait, where dress, jewellery, background, and inscription all carried deliberate meaning. Elizabeth herself kept her collection of miniatures locked away and wrapped in paper, on which she wrote the name of each sitter in her own hand. She is also reported to have ordered paintings of herself destroyed when they failed to match the official image she wished to project.

• 4. The Miniature's Origins

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  Lucas Horenbout, known in England as Hornebolt, began painting and illuminating for Henry VIII in the mid-1520s. He brought his sister Susannah with him; she was also an illuminator and worked in his workshop. It is generally accepted that Lucas Horenbout taught Hans Holbein the Younger to paint miniatures on vellum when Holbein arrived at the English court in the early 1530s. Their father, Gerard Horenbout, had been an active member of the Ghent-Bruges school of manuscript illustrators, possibly in the service of James IV of Scotland, and was briefly employed at the Tudor court as well. In Bruges, Gerard had worked alongside Sanders Bening and his son Simon on the illustrations for the Grimani Breviary. Simon Bening's eldest daughter, Levina Teerlinc, was trained as an illuminator in that same tradition. She entered Henry VIII's service at the close of 1546, following the deaths of Holbein in 1543 and Lucas Horenbout in 1544, and would go on to serve Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth as court painter and, in the case of both queens, as a lady-in-waiting. Levina Teerlinc, in turn, taught the art of limning to a young apprentice goldsmith named Nicholas Hilliard, who would marry the daughter of Queen Elizabeth's jeweller and become, by wide agreement, the supreme miniaturist of the age.

• 5. Palaces and Metalwork

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  Henry VIII's main artistic enthusiasms ran to music, building palaces, and tapestry. He accumulated over two thousand pieces of tapestry, at a cost that far exceeded anything he ever spent on painters. The Flemish set known as The Story of Abraham, still at Hampton Court Palace, is one surviving grand example from late in his reign. Painting, in financial terms, was a minor interest by comparison. The royal annuities recorded in the accounts give a sense of the hierarchy: Lucas Horenbout received somewhere between thirty-three and sixty-two pounds a year; Holbein received thirty pounds, though he also worked extensively outside the court; Levina Teerlinc received forty pounds. Nicholas Hilliard received a gift of four hundred pounds in 1591 and an annuity of forty pounds from 1599, and typically charged three pounds for a non-royal miniature. These were not negligible sums, but they were dwarfed by what the court spent on metalwork and building. Holbein produced elaborate designs for now-vanished table ornaments in precious metals. Hilliard himself was a practising goldsmith. The most spectacular palace of the Tudor period, Nonsuch Palace, begun by Henry VIII in 1538 south of London, was covered inside and out with figurative sculpted stucco reliefs across more than two thousand square metres of surface. Italians were brought in from Fontainebleau specifically for that work, to provide what the court wanted: authentic Mannerist ornament, meant to compete with, and outshine, the French original.

• 6. A Connected Community

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  Nicholas Hilliard's most famous student was Isaac Oliver, who later became limner to Anne of Denmark and Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales. Oliver married the niece of Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, the Flemish Protestant refugee portraitist who had arrived in England as a child. Gheeraerts was also the brother-in-law of John de Critz the Elder, who had himself arrived from Flanders as a child and who served as an apprentice to Lucas de Heere, a Protestant refugee who returned to Flanders after ten years when it became safe to do so. De Critz would carry this network of relationships into the Stuart period, eventually becoming Serjeant Painter and being succeeded in that role by his own son. The Serjeant Painter's office was technically a lower rank than the King's or Queen's Painter, mainly responsible for decorative work on fixtures and fittings, often of a temporary nature. The Master of the Revels, whose office organized festivals and tournaments, also drew on these painters for assistance. Pietro Torrigiano, a Florentine sculptor who arrived after breaking Michelangelo's nose and subsequently fled, made Henry VII's tomb during an extended stay, representing a rare instance of portrait sculpture at the Tudor court.

• 7. Lost Works and Uncertain Faces

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  Many surviving Tudor portraits have been badly worn over the centuries or incompetently restored. Inscriptions attached to paintings are often later than the paintings themselves and may reflect the wishful thinking of later owners rather than genuine knowledge. Anne Boleyn has been claimed as the subject of dozens of pictures; even now there is no certain image of her painted from life, and the most plausible candidate is a later copy. The only probable portrait of Catherine Howard, a miniature by Holbein in the Royal Collection, rests on circumstantial evidence alone. Attribution to specific artists presents equal difficulties. Not all artists signed their work, and those who did were inconsistent. Pictures were cut down, extended, or otherwise altered in ways that destroyed inscriptions. Workshops produced copies of the master's paintings to feed the demand for portraits, which served both as declarations of loyalty to the Crown and as furnishings for the long galleries fashionable among the Tudor elite. A well-known painting was identified by the antiquary George Vertue in 1727 as depicting Lady Frances Brandon and her second husband Adrian Stokes; that attribution stood unquestioned until 1986, when careful examination established the sitters as Mary Nevill, Baroness Dacre and her son Gregory Fiennes, 10th Baron Dacre, and the artist as Hans Eworth. The portrait of Elizabeth I as a princess, aged thirteen, has been claimed for many hands and now carries only a cautious label in recent catalogues: Flemish School, with a question mark.