Artistic licence

A magnificent portrait of the man who immortalised the English Tudor court

- Kathryn Hughes

Book of the week Holbein: Renaissance Master By Elizabeth Goldring

Much of what we know, or think we know, about the court of Henry VIII comes directly from the paintings of Hans Holbein. There's the famous portrait of the king himself puffy, phallic and cruel, looking more like a murderer than a monarch. But there is also ascetic Thomas More, hiding his cruel streak behind fine bones, and sly yet thuggish Thomas Cromwell, with those shifty eyes and the beginnings of a double chin.

"Hans the Painter" did the wives too - an appropriately sketchy drawing of Anne Boleyn, a saintly portrait of Jane Seymour who died after giving birth to Henry's heir, and a pin-up version of Anne of Cleves.

It was this last portrait that caused an international incident in 1539 when Holbein was sent by Henry to the Low Countries to check whether Anne was pretty enough to be his next wife. Based on Holbein's portrait, Henry committed to the marriage in absentia, only to be horrified when the actual Anne arrived on the Kentish coast, looking "nothing so fair as she hath been reported". The union lasted six months.

In this magnificent book, art historian Elizabeth Goldring characterises the Cleves affair as a "debacle" but also points out that it was a rare misstep for Holbein, whose portraits generally struck contemporaries as uncannily lifelike.