Retrato de la familia del artista

Holbein painted this the year he came home. He had spent two years in England, from 1526, making his name at the court of Henry VIII, and in 1528 he returned to Basel and to the family he had left behind: his wife Elsbeth and their two eldest children, Philipp and Katharina. He set them down on paper, later glued to a panel, with none of the flattery he gave his royal sitters. Elsbeth looks tired and heavy-lidded, the children pressed close against her. Within a few years Holbein went back to England for good, and the portrait stayed in Basel without him. It passed through several hands before the city bought it in 1661.