On 12 November 1549, the 12-year-old Edward VI, newly liberated from the tutelage of his overweening uncle, Lord Protector Somerset, was at last able to enter his father Henry VIII’s private apartments in the Palace of Whitehall. From the extraordinary mixture of treasures and bric-à-brac he found there, he chose one thing: ‘a book of patterns of physiognomies’ by his father’s court painter, Hans Holbein, who had died in 1543.
Edward was already familiar with his fellow European rulers from their portraits in the long gallery at St James’s, which seem to have been labelled and arranged as a teaching tool for the boy. Now, on the threshold of power, he wanted to familiarise himself with the establishment of Tudor England.
The word ‘portrait’ was unknown in the early 16th century. It entered the language thanks to Holbein
But there was a problem. It’s familiar to anyone who has opened a box of family photos and looked in bewilderment at the jumble of unknown faces: the drawings were unnamed. In similar circumstances, and at the same age as Edward, I turned to my mother; her identifications are still scribbled on the back of all too few of the photos in my childish hand. The orphaned Edward turned instead, as he so often did, to his favourite tutor, John Cheke.
By a series of extraordinary flukes, Holbein’s drawings with Cheke’s identifications are still in the Royal Collection and a selection of about half of them is on display in the Queen’s Gallery, together with a contextualising handful of Holbein’s finished portraits and a plethora of other gorgeously coloured and extravagantly formed Tudor artefacts from Hampton Court and Windsor.
The result is that the visitor can experience the same delight as Edward did on that November day almost 500 years ago: of drawings taken from life, which still seem to live and make their sitters live as well.
Kate Heard, the senior curator of prints and drawings at the Royal Collection Trust, who has organised the exhibition, is a subtly effective guide, nudging you to look closely at how Holbein achieves so much with so little: a licked finger wiped through black chalk to make a highlight in the glossy fabric of a ruffled sleeve; a dash of white on a cheek or a forehead to indicate the sheen of a beautiful woman’s skin; a dab or two of black ink to catch the thickening hair in the nape of a man’s neck; persistent jabs of the pen to get the cast of an eye or the profile of a nose exactly right.
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