The Royal Collection of works by one of the great British portraitists – the German-born Hans Holbein the Younger – is undoubtedly the best in the world, and this autumn it will go on display in the Queen’s Gallery. Focussing on his work in the service of King Henry VIII, you can expect richly coloured oils, precisely observed drawings, and delicate miniatures, images of the great and the good of Tudor England. However, there was so much more to Holbein than the astute and apparently realistic portraiture, and to this day his religious painting remains little known in Britain. To introduce the exhibition the two talks - of which this is the first - will first look at the artist himself and his origins in Germany and Switzerland, before following him to London and the Tudor Court. 

Born in Augsburg at the end of the 15th Century, and trained by his father, Hans Holbein the Elder, the younger Hans grew up a Catholic, and fulfilled numerous commissions for religious works of art. Despite this, and his deft negotiations to manipulate the complexities of religious reform, his personal faith has always been open to interpretation. In any case, much of his work was also entirely secular, including the decoration of houses, designs for household objects, and, inevitably, the occasional portrait. 

From Germany he travelled to Switzerland, and thence, with a letter of introduction from the scholar Erasmus, to London. He went back to Basel for four years, before returning to England in 1532, where he was to remain for the rest of his life. 

The first talk of this pair will cover these early years up until the creation of his greatest surviving masterpiece, The Ambassadors, painted at the beginning of his second visit to England.