Welcome to the second part of our podcast special on Hands Holbine the Younger.

In our last episode we broke off the discussion just as Holbine returned to England in the

early 1530s. We had learnt that he was born in Alksburg and had learnt his craft from

his father, also an artist, Hands Holbine the Elder. The younger Holbine then travelled

to Basel where he got his first independent portrait commission and married, before

setting off across Europe via France and Antwerp under the patronage of the humanist

Diziderus Erasmus. It was Erasmus' contact to Thomas More who received him in England

in the late 1520s and commissioned from him two great portraits. Holbine was just starting

to get famous in London when he had to return to Basel and to his family and his wife

Elspeth, but the iconoclastic Protestant town was no longer an ideal place for an artist.

And so in the early 1530s he went back to England. Today we'll follow him into Henry VIII's

court and hear how he created an image of Henry VIII that would transcend the centuries,

the full-length, full frontal picture of the king staring at the spectator, legs a

Kimbo and with that voluminous gown. It has come to dominate how we think of Henry VIII.

My guests on today's special podcast panel are Dr Susan Foister, Deputy Director and

Director of Collections at the National Gallery in London where Holbine's Ambassadors

hangs and the author of Holbine and England. Dr Jean Nickterline read in the history of

art at the University of York and author of the 2020 book Hans Holbine, the artist in

the changing world and Franny Moil, the author of the King's Painter, the Life and Times

of Hans Holbine published this year. And the question I have posed is that when Holbine

returned to London he found that all his patrons had died or lost their positions. So Susan,

what did he do? Well I think he very quickly had to find some new contacts and he was immediately

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