Attributions of portraits to Holbein seem nearly as common in England as claims of “Mayflower” ancestors to Americans. Hans Holbein the Younger worked in England for less than fifteen years combined in his stays of 1526–28 and 1532–43, but he was extremely prolific and brought with him to England skills and styles that were both entirely unequaled and in very great demand. His impact on English painting, indeed on its monarchy and ruling elite as well, and the contacts he brought to the contemporary art of the continental Renaissance seem every bit as dramatic as Inigo Jones's similar contribution to English architecture in the following century. His portraits especially have been examined and pondered as extensively as any in the canon of English painting. Sir Roy Strong's dictum that “Hans Holbein the younger … had an influence directly or otherwise on all artists working in England in the sixteenth century” (Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, 2 vols. [London, 1969], 1:ix–x) summarizes a long-standing scholarly judgment.

Whether Susan Foister intended her title as a reference to two of Strong's short essays on the subject or not (“Holbein in England, I and II,” Burlington Magazine, 109 [1967]: 276–81, and “Holbein in England, III to V,” Burlington Magazine 111 [1969]: 698–702), her book of that title under consideration here breaks new ground and sweeps all before it in several respects.

Foister's first distinctive contribution (chap. 2, “England”) is a comprehensive discussion of the context for Holbein's career in England: a long, lively, and learned survey of the state of English visual arts in Holbein's time that could well serve as an excellent freestanding introduction to the subject. Among other points, this essay-in-itself allows us to see beyond the earlier and still persistent assumption that portraiture filled a sudden vacuum in English paintings left by the abrupt cessation of religious art. Foister tacitly acknowledges that most surviving English paintings of this era are indeed portraits but recognizes that it is the portraits which would have avoided more than any other genre the enormity and extent of Reformation iconoclasm. She also takes the more recent scholarship of, for example, Eamon Duffy and Margaret Aston on the pace of the English Reformation, to note that religious art, like medieval Catholicism itself, waned more slowly and less completely there than one had earlier assumed.

On another theme, she deals sensitively with the relations between foreign-born artists and the native English painters, most of them Painter-Stainers, who competed for patronage without ever merging their numbers or their approaches, at least in the sixteenth century, into a unified artisan community. As she reminds us, not only were nondenizened foreigners still legally proscribed in Holbein's time from taking on English apprentices, but they were of course bitterly resented by the English counterparts to begin with. The consequence of this standoff may have looked like job protection to the native born, but it set back the technical skills and stylistic sophistication of English painters several generations, thereby arguably perpetuating rather than reducing the long-term influence of foreigners among those who could afford their services.

It is in discussions like these that we benefit from the sure-footed and thorough use of documentary evidence (postmortem inventories, household accounts, and state papers) that has marked Foister's work from the start of her distinguished career and that allows her to bring the impressively contextualized perspective on the subject before her here. This approach supports much of her general discussion of the art scene at that time; it also illuminates more closely than ever before the nature and significance of Holbein's patrons, the value placed on his work, and the circumstances in which he produced it.

Foister also draws effectively on newer, technology-based scholarship for examining paintings themselves. Her own 1983 updating of Karl Parker's 1945 catalog of Holbein drawings, along with John Rowlands's 1985 reconsideration of his paintings, allows her to work with a revised list of his works. This in turn allows her to reject earlier interpretations of his style that rested on the evidence of works that now appear misattributed. Then, too, she uses both written documentation and drawings to reveal more clearly the full scope of Holbein's oeuvre. This extended well beyond the portraiture for which he is best known and into metalwork design, drawing, woodcuts, medallions, and even architecture. Aided by the unparalleled production standards of Yale University Press and by illustrations that are both copious and lavish, she talks us through a detailed and beautifully illustrated understanding of Holbein's ability to convey the illusions of perspective, movement, color, and dramatic composition.

In sum, Foister's consideration of Holbein and his milieu is far more comprehensive, detailed, and adroitly contextualized than anything before it. She allows us a fuller appreciation of his technical skills, the breadth of his work, his sheer aesthetic imagination, and his impact on those around him, both patrons and fellow artists and craftsmen. My only caveat, sheepishly offered in the face of such impressive scholarship, is to wonder if her final judgment on Holbein's influence on other artists, stopping just short of Strong’s, can entirely be sustained. Notwithstanding the work of John Bettes and others whom she holds up here as acolytes, the diverse and sometimes bizarre paths that English portraiture took in the near century between Holbein's death and Rubens's arrival, and the very distance between native-born and foreign-born painters of which she speaks, leaves this as something of an open question. Well, reviewers must have their quibble. Notwithstanding this one, this is an Alp of a book: the comprehensively drawn and sensitively nuanced landscape of a lifetime's fastidious research and a joy to read as well.