An Engelsberg Ideas Book of the Year 2025
A New Statesman Book of the Year 2025
A Country Life Book of the Year 2025
Engaging and beautiful.Katherine Harvey, Times (UK)
[ Holbeins] great achievement was to bring before us the living, breathing men and women who plotted, suffered, contrived and triumphed through the most terrifying decades of English history. And it is Goldrings achievement to show us the process by which this magic happened.Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian
A Spectator Art Book of the Year 2025
A Telegraph Book of the Year 2025
Goldrings . . . great strength is her scholastic ability to interrogate the documentary evidence that informs the production of Holbeins work, using it to unpick the where and the when, and to correct or qualify assertions that have long gone unchallenged.Franny Moyle, Art Newspaper
This fine book gives us the wider picture, including his metalwork designs. There is hardly an illustration that one can look at without murmuring heavens, thats good.Huon Mallalieu, Country Life
To Goldrings credit, it is hard to imagine that another biography will be required for quite some time.David Eskerdjian, The Oldie
It is hard to imagine how this biography could be betteredit is bold without being eccentric, unfailingly alert to context and possibility, and entertainingly readable throughout. The book itself is a thing of beauty, adorned with over 250 high-quality and meticulously placed colour illustrations. It is a work of craftsmanship of which Holbein himself might have approved.Peter Marshall, Literary Review
Such a brilliant piece of historiography, and illustrative of her complete mastery of both the immediate sources and the wider circumstantial evidence for Holbeins life and work.Mathew Lyons, Broken Compass
Goldring, with an extraordinary command of the archives, assiduously charts Holbeins professional career.Engelsberg Ideas
A magnificent biography of Hans Holbein astounds.Bookseller
A work of consummate scholarship.Michael Prodger, New Statesman
Meticulously detailed, judicious and perceptive, it will surely prove the definitive account of Holbeins life, and of the life and afterlife of his work, for many years to come.Mathew Lyons, Spectator
Goldring gives full weight to Holbeins inventiveness as a designer and a worker in precious metals, while breathing life into the individuals whom he portrayed and sketched.Nicholas Cranfield, Church Times
A superbly written and magnificently produced tribute to an artist who was far more than a Court painter for Henry VIII.Michael Hall, Country Life
An immaculate piece of scholarship wrapped up in the most handsome of volumes.Michael Prodger, Engelsberg Ideas
Fantastic. . . . Definitive.Waldy and Bendys Adventures in Art (podcast)
Goldring considers Holbein from numerous angles, placing him in the thick of the political and religious turmoil of his times. While unafraid to ask questions to which there are no clear answers, with hundreds of judicious touches she paints a fittingly masterful portrait of an enigmatic and supremely gifted man.Susan Owens, World of Interiors
This is a biography that shuns the temptations of romanticism or novelistic imaginings without ever losing sight of the human at its centre. . . . What is remarkable is the extent to which Holbein himself emerges as a living figure.Tim Smith-Laing, Apollo
[ Goldrings] handsome and superbly illustrated book is intelligent and well written, and scrupulously examines the documentary evidence.Jeffrey Meyers, The Article
Goldring has produced a superb biography. . . . The Holbein who emerges from her book is a well-rounded figure . . . able to produce work of such sensitivity that he won commissions from some of the greatest patrons in Europe.Kate Heard, LRB
A solid, accessible account of Holbeins life and art.Alexander Marr, Burlington Magazine
