by Mavis Cheek
Certain portrait painters breathe life into their work. The create the speaking likeness, the likeness that is called, in old parlance, ‘very lively’, meaning lifelike. Holbein’s Anna of Cleves portrait was called exactly this by one of Henry’s visiting Envoys, Sir Nicholas Wootton, at the Court of Cleves. The Envoy was well trusted and well-placed to make the remark having seen the lady in question. But a lively portrait is not simply a clever illusory likeness captured in paint or pencil, it is a portrait that has captured the indefinable essence of the subject’s human qualities – where the artist’s eye and the artist’s understanding of psychology combine in a likeness that is only a moment away – a breath– from stepping out from the frame. When – if – they do step out – the viewer is sure that he or she will know them. Portraiture became an integral part of the Northern European Tradition but Holbein broke the ground for those who came later. Rembrandt might now be considered the master, and Holbein would certainly have credited him with that status, but Holbein led the way. Portraiture was the acceptable Reformist focus in those times of religious and political turbulence after the Reformation. Gone were the Catholic images of saints, and Madonnas – instead came the art of the ‘lively’ portrait, the speaking likeness, man and woman here on earth and the image of royalty as modern day icons. These, after the Reformation, were the only safe ways forward for the artist from Augsburg.
What Rembrandt, less than a hundred years later, took to its ultimate morality in his last portraits, Holbein begins in his body of work. When Rembrandt, in his last self portraits, puts a fancy hat on his old head and paints himself not as grand or modish any more but an old man who shows you that vanity counts, in the end, for nothing, it follows on from Holbein. Less knowingly, more innocently, this is what Holbein does when he paints Anna in her jewellery and her overwhelming Brabantine cap with its gaudy tassel. A bonnet Rembrandt would certainly have envied. It emphasises rather than hides the human qualitie and vulnerabilities of its wearer.
Holbein, during his years at the English court – for the very first time in portraiture – and following the new way of man at the centre of the universe – plucked out the human being from the courtly veneer of those subjects who commissioned him. Those first subjects were unselfconscious, curious and a little unsure, perhaps, of what a personal portrait meant. He captured this moment of change in his Tudor portraits. There is not one who does not reveal his or her nature – sometimes for the very things they chose to be painted in and sometimes – as with Anna – despite their trappings – and they confronted Holbein with an openness that would never occur again. It is that, I believe, that we see in the Anna portrait.
Rembrandt and Velasquez, Goya and Titian – Masters – but in portraiture Holbein was the first Master. It is perhaps the only laurel that Henry VIII deserves, that he recognised and passionately supported Holbein’s genius. Even a tyrant can pay homage to artistic greatness. Holbein did not flatter his sitters, king or commoner. He painted portraits with understanding – with an affinity perhaps. His was not the dispassionate, painterly eye of Velasquez nor the wistful, jaundiced eye of the great Goya but the eye that breathed life – quirks and all – with a dedication to truth.
Why, then, did Henry fall in love with the portrait and despise the flesh and blood woman?
When Holbein painted Anna of Cleves he knew her kind. She came from the same background and traditions as him and was as far removed from the coquetry of the French court as he was himself. He painted her with sleepy eyelids – unawakened – facing frontally as if to meet the challenge of the new life ahead. He painted her with dignity and with seriousness and there is also courage in her stance. In modern portrait jargon, Holbein ‘got’ her. Unawakened but willing is the human – and the erotic – summa brevis of the portrait. Henry would have read the erotic message without concerning himself with why the lady was so unawakened and willing. Her complete lack of coquetry, enticing mannerisms, well learned little seductions, the stuff on which Henry feasted in his love life, were all missing from the portrait. As, indeed, was something else . . .
While Holbein cannot tell a painterly lie – he can present his subject in the most attractive way possible. He therefore posed Anna without a hint of a turn to the face both as an expression of her character – and because it showed her at her best – and this was, after all, a portrait designed to be an advertisement. Holbein chose, therefore, not to draw attention to a part of her anatomy that might be unattractive. If Holbein turned her sideways – as he did the portrait of Christina of Milan – also a potential bride of Henry’s – even slightly – it would be unavoidable for him to paint Anna of Cleves’ long nose. Other contemporary portraits extant painted of the Lady by her own court artist, Barthel Bruyn, show that there is underpainting – the nose has been shortened. Holbein’s pose for the princess deals with the physical flaw brilliantly and honestly. It is interesting that Lucas Cranach, much admired in England as on the Continent, pleaded illness when asked to paint the princess. Perhaps it seemed easier to pass the commission to his pupil who might have fewer qualms, if qualms were called for. Henry chose to ignore the Barthel Bruyn picture and to send his own painter to Cleves. He might, in retrospect, have wished he had not. Holbein – painting the truth but choosing the good truth – posed his subject accordingly. He gave Anna a little help.
Now – Holbein liked noses. He was not a man to flinch from noses. Look at any of his portraits and he draws or paints his noses generously and lovingly – in his self-portrait hanging in the Uffizi he shows his own nose, broken like Henry’s, to be a considerable presence – but he clearly felt that Anna’s nose was a nose that was best not celebrated in paint. Face her frontally and the problem is solved. He is not disguising the nose, merely avoiding it. Holbein’s entirely honourable method achieved the same result. One can comfortably say that he knew how much Cromwell, his paymaster after the King, wanted this match and while he would not sacrifice truth for painted lies, where he could accommodate, he did so.
In the end his court painter gave Henry a portrait that told him all he needed to know about the young woman with whom he contemplated marriage. This is no sophisticated, fashionable young woman who will fascinate away his hours with her skills and wiles – at least not yet – but Henry ignored Holbein’s truth. In his rush to assuage his mortification at being rejected by several eligible European ladies, Christina of Denmark and Marie of Guise particularly, Henry ignored the character in Anna’s portrait and concentrated on its surface charms. The Tudor Court with all its aggression and uncouth masculinity was no place to be a King without a wife. A feminine hand was needed. Henry, most definitely, wanted to be wed.
In the end it mattered little what he was told in letters from envoys and what Holbein painted into the portrait so discreetly. Anna of Cleves was found to be lovely enough. Henry was in no mood to be gainsaid. If the portrait of Anna of Cleves were to be cleaned and restored it would show how its sumptuousness and its colour would dazzle any hopeful King. Even now, dulled by the patina of time, it has a glow and richness about it. Holbein at his most seductive indeed.
So the mystery of Henry and Anna and the success of the portrait and rejection of the real thing is partly to do with the King’s own psychological state at the time of the painting’s arrival, and partly to do with Holbein’s eye for a cunning pose and his painter’s way with surfaces. Anna of Cleves, five hundred years on, is still exactly what he painted, a dignified young woman quietly waiting for the world to open to her and love her.
At the museum Flora enquired where the portrait hung and followed the signs. The place was waiting for the onslaughts of the day for it had not yet filled with people. It was in that hour before tour groups and school outings made rendezvous and the few visitors were not hurrying themselves. Flora, by contrast, almost raced along, turning this way and that, ignoring enticing works as she sped past, up in lifts, down again, sideways, trotting through rooms of paintings which she scarcely noticed
. As if Fate herself were in charge of her. Looking back, a long time later, she was surprised to remember how little she felt as she crossed the threshold of that most famous of art museums. It would change her life, that visit. Bells might ring, sirens might sound, but they did not – nothing broke the low notes of whispered conversations, nor disturbed the gravity of the place as she made her early way through the galleries.
How strange it was, Flora thought, to be rushing towards an unknown painting, in a foreign gallery, with a heart beating so fast from excitement. Very strange. It was only a portrait after all. But there was her heart again, missing a beat. She was practically palpitating by the time she arrived at the small side room. She read the information card fixed to the wall first. It was to the point.
anna of cleves by hans holbein the younger (1497–1543)
Anna of Cleves was Henry VIII’s fourth wife. This was the betrothal portrait painted in the summer of 1539 when she was not quite twenty-four. She was a great disappointment to the King when she arrived in England in January 1540 and he divorced her after six months to marry Catherine Howard. She remained in England for the next seventeen years and died, after a short illness, in 1557 at Chelsea, London.
Then, at last, she stepped back and looked.
The portrait hung against a wall of dusty green silk – set between two much smaller contemporary portraits of men in flamboyant sixteenth-century dress. Flora had the room entirely to herself. She stood about two feet away from the picture and gazed. It was almost as if she was staring into a mirror so exactly still and similar were their poses. But of course the woman in the picture was young. Flora looked at her and she looked back at Flora. Neither blinked. Well, thought Flora, there is plug ugly and there is not very attractive and there is plain, and the young woman whom she saw in the painting was certainly none of these. The Brabantine bonnet Anna wore took her hair straight off her face, left her forehead entirely bare, and meant that there was nothing between the viewer and the subject’s face which was a very nice oval. Flora liked the young woman at once.
There was a small bench in the middle of the room. Flora sat down, facing the portrait. She could see that Henry’s approving eyes had not lied. The young woman – though overdressed by any standards – had a tawny rather than creamy complexion (though Flora thought this might just be the patina of age) and a sweet and appealing face and she was glad that she had avoided looking at reproductions of the portrait; it was striking to see it, to see her, for the first time and in the flesh – well so to speak – and for Flora to see why Henry chose her. Maybe she was only halfway fair, maybe Holbein did spice her up, but there was no real sign of it in the painting. None at all. Those sleepy, slanting eyelids looked out in unsophisticated simplicity and were, to Flora’s mind, beautiful, while the Princess’s expression was genuine and guileless.
Flora stepped nearer. Holbein had painted a glow about Anna that gave her a hint of magic. Maybe he was not quite as honourable as history suggested. Maybe he knew that the marriage was a fait accompli and that Henry would see what he wanted to see no matter how he painted her. According to Scarisbrick, Henry loved a gay and lively court, and Henry knew that the way to a gay and lively court was to have a queen to guide it. This woman was not yet that queen but one in the making, willing to learn. The outward facing pose says that she is willing and at the same time Holbein puts in as much as he dare about her naïvety. Maybe the pose was also helpful if the story of her long nose was true. The serendipity of art, Flora decided.
There were other stories – such a mythology existed around this one beautiful painting – the most convoluted of which was that Anna’s gown contained a hidden message about her intellectual drawbacks. It suggested that the jewelled banding on Anna’s skirt being bigger on the left than on the right – said to translate for those who understood it as a pun on the courtly French for ‘trait à gauche, pas à droit’ – or – ‘très gauche, pas adroite’ – in other words the subject was not skilled in the manners and accomplishments of the English court – was Holbein’s message to the King. Flora could only think that if this big hint were true and if it were the way of the court to read such puns in those days, then Henry would recognise it and act accordingly. It seemed to Flora that for a painter to say such a thing about a potential Queen of England to the tyrannical King was – to put it mildly – dangerous. And anyway Henry already knew that Anna was unsophisticated. His envoy, Sir Nicholas Wootton, accompanying Holbein to Cleves wrote to the King saying, ‘She can read and write her own language but of French or Latin or other language she knows none, nor can she sing or play an instrument for it is considered undignified and shallow for German Ladies to do so . . .’ And you couldn’t be clearer than that, thought Anna. So Holbein’s message was unnecessary. All he needed to do was paint what he saw. It was Sir Nicholas Wootton’s job to write what he saw and he had done so. Wootton said she was fair and it was Holbein’s job to make a true portrait of her. Would Holbein do otherwise? Given what Flora had read about him she did not think so. She looked hard at the portrait. The portrait looked serenely back. Almost ready to speak, it seemed.
It was then that something touched Flora’s heart about the painted face. She stood up and went nearer, holding up her hands to block out the richness of Anna’s embroidered cap, the opulence of Anna’s jewels and the golden gorgeousness of her ornaments so that she saw only the unadorned features. When she did this, the face looked back at her with a simple openness, confronting the world with absolute honesty. When Flora removed her hands and let the face take its place within the gold and rich rose velvet of the painted gown the expression remained quite certain in its calm determination. Here I am, it said. This is me.
Anna’s waist was dainty and neat, her crossed hands elegant, which belied her being called large, bony and masculine by one sneering historian. If they ever looked at this portrait they looked without seeing. Even though the young shoulders seemed wide as an American footballer’s in the padded finery of its German court dress and the bosom – which looked full – and was all but hidden by an armoury of gold and jewels – the figure could not be anything but slender. Above the face the heavily decorated cap that held and hid all Anna’s hair was framed by wings of the finest gauze. Flora smiled. These silly little wings gave the portrait its only touch of levity, a lightness to counter the heaviness of everything else – though Flora read that the background colour would once have been a singing blue-green rather than the slate-like darkness accrued with age. The portrait might be as imponderable as an icon if it were not for that face which was absolutely real – so real that for a dizzy moment Flora thought she could ask it a question and it would answer. But what question?
Time passes. Flora stands back from the portrait now, her head on one side. No matter what angle she chooses, she thinks, this is the most engaging portrait she has ever seen. Or perhaps she has found it at a sympathetic time in her life. Or worse, perhaps she has never truly looked at a portrait before. In the past a portrait was merely an arrangement of colour and light and form and curiosity, brought alive by the sitter’s story. Now, knowing all she knows about the painting and the princess, she looks beyond the construction of the work and its vulgar anecdote at the person, only at the person, and not at a dumped princess. This is a human being, this is a young woman who could just as easily be a friend. Anna is real. Edward would have laughed if she had said that to him. He would have leaned forward and tapped the long-dried paint, feeling himself allowed such privilege, and he would have pointed out that the girl was two-dimensional – nothing alive about her at all. Well, Edward, she thinks, sometimes enlightenment comes more easily to those who stand and look or listen. Milton was right – ‘They also serve . . .’ If Edward were with her now she might – and at long last – have the courage to point that out to him.
Flora moves nearer to the painting – close enough to touch it if she chose – not that she would – but the attendant says nothing. All around Anna, in
other, grander rooms, there are portraits far more valuable and famous – there are Rubenses and Rembrandts, Titians and Velasquezes – trumpet calls of paintings, paintings that hit the headlines. Somewhere in the museum is the most famous portrait in the world, La Gioconda: the Mona Lisa sits behind bullet-proof, fire-resistant glass and an infra-red security system. Mobile telephones are held up to photograph that most famous smile and heads and elbows jostle to get near so much famous beauty. The Mona Lisa is a celebrity and like all celebrities her fame brings magpies, keen to remove a piece of her – and with the magpies comes fear. This German princess, and temporary English Queen, is left to her own devices in matters of her safety. No infra-red security for Anna. No celebrity she.
‘I think,’ says Flora softly, for the gallery is empty apart from the attendant, ‘that Henry was mad.’ She looks down at her notes and reads aloud: ‘“ . . . She excels the Duchess as far as the golden sun doth excel the moon . . .” And the English courtier who wrote that to Henry was probably right . . . After all, he was in Cleves and he could see for himself . . . It was probably Anna’s rival, the Duchess of Milan, he was talking about.’ The Princess of Cleves looks out unblinkingly. Five hundred years of being dismissed, thinks Flora, would make you impassive. ‘If you’re a Flanders Mare,’ she whispers, ‘then I’m the Queen of Sheba.’ She would like to think that – just for a glimmer of a moment – the portrait looks amused.