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Hans Holbein the Younger was born in Augsburg into a family of painters; his first teacher was his father, Hans Holbein the Elder. By about 1515 he was working in Basel as a portraitist, designer of woodcuts, and painter of religious and civic subjects. The Reformation’s disruption of church patronage pushed him toward secular portraiture. From 1526, and permanently after 1532, he worked in England, becoming court painter to Henry VIII.
His most celebrated panel is The Ambassadors (1533, National Gallery, London), with its anamorphic skull and meticulous still-life of learning and power. Other key works include portraits of Erasmus (versions in the Louvre, Paris, and elsewhere), Christina of Denmark (1538, National Gallery, London), and the iconic likenesses of Henry VIII and his circle preserved in the Royal Collection, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, and the Frick Collection, New York.
Holbein joined Northern precision of surface with a cool, international Renaissance clarity of design. His English court portraits fixed an image of Tudor authority that later centuries treated as documentary as well as artistic fact.