Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Hans Holbein the Younger
German; 16th-century
The Hague, The Netherlands: Mauritshuis
84%
Portrait of a Woman from Southern Germany. c1520-1525. Oil on panel
The Flemish Primitives' portraits had, as the very first contributions to this genre, already unveiled and, to the point of perfection, exploited its essential character. To make a portrait is to create a distinction that is as ontological as it is blandly formal, between a figure and a ground; to make an artistically great portrait is to stage a scene that depends on this distinction to the same degree as it negates it. So, what was a painter of likenesses working a century after van Eyck to do? Holbein, when he's on, makes his sitters float far above the surfaces they're set against, but then they manage in the slightest ways to indicate some situatedness within their environments, too, causing the essential front-back distinction to dissolve and thereby allowing the picture to put itself forth as a totality: his figures convince you that they both are and aren't set irreconcilably against their grounds. In this painting, it occurs through the slightly heightened realism of the woman's face compared with her coat and shirt; the recurrence of the background's marbled texture in the surface of her headdress; the twist of her belt's clasp and the fold of her hands; the tiny wedges of blue that peak through the space between her arms and her torso. The effect of untroubled individuation is exquisite, but it's necessarily more hard-won that it was 100 years before. You sense the weight of a tradition beginning to bear down on Holbein. His paintings are reliant on techniques, which is why they're hit or miss. (TFS, 2026)
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
74%
Mary, Lady Guildford. 1526. Oil on canvas
Who the hell am I to fault Holbein for not getting things right representationally? But man, that bust is pretty busted. Otherwise, this is a lackluster portrait from the master portraitist. The mise en scène is nice and balanced but a little overdone (the ornate column at left; the two pillars behind it that don't quite punch up the painting's depth as they ought to; the horizontal bar plus the reaching branch below it, where only one or the other would have done the space-defining trick). Because there's so much noise in the scene, all the decorative stuff in the figure's get-up — which should've been the main attraction — fails to pop the way it might've. Nor does Mary seem cut in relief the way the figures in Holbein's sparer pictures do. Still, it's Holbein we're talking about: this painting has more than a few redeeming features. Notice, for instance, how that branch contours the sitter with its curve, but then how all the refracting pyramids that make her up (her headpiece, her bent left arm, her necklace, that black veil behind her) seem to rebuff this. There's tension in this painting, it's just been suppressed by all the overproduction. (TFS, 2025)
The Hague, The Netherlands: Mauritshuis
53%
Portrait of a Nobleman with a Falcon. c1542. Oil on panel
There are a handful of things that hold this painting back, but chief among them is the sluggishness of the black-shirt-against-gray-wall dynamic. There's just no energy there. That such a minor issue places such a severe limitation on this painting's quality — it's really not a good Holbein — is a reminder that portraiture lives and dies on little more than its ability to suffuse a figure-ground distinction with spatial intrigue and philosophical import. Other problems with this painting: the writing exacerbates the weakness of the front-back relation; the sitter's address is way too direct, placing the painting's locus arbitrarily somewhere off of its surface; the bird in profile is badly rendered and so kills all the subtlety in the sitter's face; the lower left is cluttered and, again, detracts from the would-be elegance of the nobleman simply asserting himself in space. At right, that gash of red is an ingenious, enlivening flourish, but it's not enough to salvage the painting. (TFS, 2026)