If the Tudors “exercise a stronger hold on the public imagination than their Plantagenet precursors or Stuart successors”, it is largely “because we can all picture them so clearly”, said Peter Marshall in Literary Review . And that, in turn, is down to one man: the German artist Hans Holbein. Between the late 1520s and the early 1540s, Holbein lived mostly in England and produced an “extraordinary sequence of portraits and drawings” of Henry VIII, his wives and courtiers.

Today, as Elizabeth Goldring explains in her “superb and groundbreaking biography ”, it is hard to “appreciate just how novel Holbein’s portraits appeared to the first people who saw them”.

Before he emerged, portraiture was a fairly underdeveloped art form in northern Europe. Yet suddenly, as Goldring puts it,

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