Holbein and his copyists Susan Foister, Director of Collections,
National Gallery Making Art in Tudor Britain Abstracts from
Academic Workshops (2007-8) This paper first offered a brief
survey of something of what we know concerning the working
practices of Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8-1543) working in
England from 1526-8 and then by 1532 to his death in London in
1543, in order to provide a basis for assessing the National
Portrait Gallery copies and then considered some issues
surrounding the making of copies of Holbein’s portraits in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The materials available to
painters working in Northern Europe during the sixteenth century
and even beyond were relatively limited with little scope for
local variation and the techniques used to paint with them were
similarly consistent. There is therefore relatively little scope
for technical means of distinguishing the work of Holbein in
making portraits in oil paint from that of his copyists. Some of
Holbein’s paintings have a