A brush with the Tudors
QUESTION Who became the royal court artist after Hans Holbein’s death in 1543?
MANY foreign painters were employed by the Tudor court. Two held the title of King’s Painter at the same time during the reign of Henry VIII: the German master Hans Holbein the Younger and Flemish miniaturist Lucas Horenbout.
They were succeeded by Flemish artist William Scrots. He is chiefly remembered for two full-length portraits of Henry’s son Edward VI, one in the Royal Collection at Hampton Court Palace and another in the Louvre.
When Henry VIII succeeded Henry VII in 1509, he followed in the footsteps of his father and brought portraitists and artisans from Germany and the Low Countries to his court.
Henry VII had employed the services of Netherlands artist Meynnart Wewyck, ‘the Inglis payntour’, who worked in the court until 1525. He painted portraits of Henry VII, Elizabeth of York, Prince Arthur, Prince Henry and Lady Margaret Beaufort, for which he was paid the princely sum of £1.
Hans Holbein the Younger visited London in 1526 and in 1532, becoming King’s Painter in 1536. His depiction of Henry VIII became the definitive likeness of the Tudor monarch.
Holbein also painted Henry’s wives Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves and Catherine Howard, and his son Edward VI.
Lucas Horenbout, pioneer of the portrait miniature, was King’s Painter from 1531 until his death in 1544. His portraits of the king at Hatfield House, Herts, are the earliest surviving ad vivum — painted from life — depictions and were done to help the king decide whether to shave off or keep his beard.
It is a reflection of the regard in which Horenbout was held that the king was prepared to sit for him. Records show he was paid at least £33 per annum while Holbein received £30.
Other artists and artisans in the Tudor court included serjeant painters, who painted and gilded the King’s residences, as well as many visiting portrait artists.
William Scrots followed Holbein as King’s Painter to Henry VIII in 1546, with a substantial salary of £62 10s.
He continued in this role during the reign of the boy king Edward VI. His salary was stopped on Edward’s death in 1553, after which it is presumed he left England. While Scrots is not held in the same artistic regard as Holbein, he had a keen eye for the fashion of the time, popularising full-length portraiture.
Daniel Boyle, Bishop’s Stortford, Herts.
QUESTION When the Royal Navy intercepted slave ships crossing the Atlantic in the 19th century, were the captives returned home?
THE Royal Navy began an anti-slavery patrol in 1808 following Britain’s decision to abolish its slave trade the year before.
In 1819, the Royal Navy set up a naval station at Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, the first British colony in West Africa. The Royal Navy West Africa Squadron seized 1,600 ships involved in the slave trade, freeing 150,000 Africans.
What happened to the ‘recaptives’ is a complex story. About 85,000 went to Sierra Leone. Initially known as the Province of Freedom, it was founded by abolitionists who believed the African Diaspora could be resettled.
About 20,000 were returned home to states close to Sierra Leone.
The remainder followed the original path of the Atlantic slave trade, ending up in the Caribbean.
From 1840 to the late 1860s, scores of ships had brought 31,000 slaves to the South Atlantic island of St Helena.
Nearly 10,000, many of them children, died following horrific treatment. Survivors were granted freedom and went to the British sugar-producing colonies, Jamaica, British Guiana and Trinidad, which were desperate for labour after slavery had been abolished.
Though the Royal Navy captured no more than 10 per cent of slave ships, the role of the West Africa Squadron exerted considerable pressure on other nations that continued this terrible trade.
The cost to the Royal Navy was heavy: one sailor died in action or of disease for every nine slaves freed.
Diana Rees, Chepstow, Monmouthshire.
QUESTION Is there a term to describe an image that contains a repeatedly smaller version of itself?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, a wellknown example of the Droste effect of producing an image within an image could be found on the original Camp Coffee label.
A Sikh holds a bottle that contains his picture, which contains his picture and so on. It fascinated me as a boy that if it was possible to magnify this image continuously it would go on for ever.
Alan Sharpe, Melton Mowbray, Leics. ON THE 1969 cover of Pink Floyd’s album Ummagumma, the designers, Hipgnosis, put the Droste effect to an imaginative use.
Singer David Gilmour is in the foreground and in the decreasing window behind are images of the different band members in the same pose.
Martin Redwood, Pontypool, Gwent. I’VE been fascinated by the Droste technique for many years. I am a micro-artist and have engraved an 1mm image of the Queen on the head of a pin. In the Queen’s hair, I’ve engraved the same image with a third portrait in this smaller engraving.
The thickness of a hair is measured at 100 microns. The smallest portrait is 12 microns, the size of two red blood cells. This is my limit — I can’t go any smaller.
Graham Short, Birmingham. IS THERE a question to which you want to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question here? Write to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT; or email charles.legge@dailymail.co.uk. A selection is published, but we’re unable to enter into individual correspondence.