Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Hans Holbein the Younger
German; 16th-century
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)