Francesco Bartolozzi ( 1725 – 1815) Italian engraverAn Italian engraver, whose most
productive period was spent in London.

He was born in Florence. He was originally destined to follow the profession of his father, a gold- and silver-smith, but he manifested so much skill and taste in designing that he was placed under the supervision of two Florentine artists, including Ignazio Hugford and Giovanni Domenico Ferretti who instructed him in painting. After devoting three years to that art, he went to Venice and studied engraving. He particularly admired the work of Joseph Wagner[1]. His first productions in Venice were plates in the style of Marco Ricci, Zuccarelli, and others, while working for Wagner, which began to draw attention. He then moved for a short time to Rome, where he completed a set of engravings representing frescoes at Grottaferrata by Domenichino depicting the life of St Nilus. He soon returned to Venice and left for London in 1764.

For nearly forty years he lived in London. He produced an enormous number of engravings, including Clytie after Annibale Carracci, and of the Virgin and Child, after Carlo Dolci. A great proportion of them are from the works of Cipriani and Angelica Kauffmann. Bartolozzi also contributed a number of plates to Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. He also drew sketches of his own in red chalk. Soon after arriving in London, he was appointed engraver to the king with a salary of £300 a year. He was elected a founding member of the Royal Academy in 1768, and in 1802 became the founding President of the short-lived Society of Engravers.

Bartolozzi achieved a technological breakthrough by inventing a new stipple technique of colored engraving, in which he successfully reproduced the famous colored portrait drawings of Holbein from the Royal collection in 1793.

In 1802, Bartolozzi accepted the post of director of the National Academy of Lisbon, the city where he died. His son Gaetano Stefano Bartolozzi, born in 1757, was also an engraver, and the father of Madame Vestris.

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Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497–between 7 and 29 November 1543) was a German artist and printmaker who worked in a Northern Renaissance style. He is best known as one of the greatest portraitists of the 16th century. He was the most important painter working in England during the Reformation, though he was born in Augsburg, trained in Basel and spent a total of only thirteen years in England, from 1526 to 1528 and from 1532 to 1543. Of the eighty portrait drawings by Holbein now at Windsor, thirty can be connected with surviving paintings, and nearly all the remainder were no doubt studies for lost works. In 1547 'a booke of paternes for phisioneamyes', probably identifiable with the Holbein series, was inventoried in Edward VI's collection. In most cases the identity of the sitter is known only from the inscriptions on the drawings, apparently copied in the eighteenth century from identifications made by Sir John Cheke, tutor to Edward VI.

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William Warham (c.1455-1532) was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by Henry VII in 1503, after a career as a diplomat and lawyer; from 1504 to 1515 he was also Lord Chancellor. The accession of Henry VIII in 1509 and his preferment of Thomas Wolsey brought Warham and Wolsey into frequent conflict over matters of ecclesiastical authority. None the less the two of them began proceedings for the King's divorce from Katherine of Aragon, and after Wolsey's fall from power in 1529 Warham assumed sole responsibility for pursuing the matter. His reluctance was apparent, and shortly before his death in August 1532 he voiced his clear opposition. Only with the subsequent appointment of Thomas Cranmer to the archbishopric was the divorce effected.

Warham was a friend and patron of Erasmus, and in 1524 Erasmus sent him as a gift his portrait by Holbein, probably the painting dated 1523 in the collection of the Earl of Radnor. On Holbein's arrival in England, Warham returned the compliment, and the present drawing is Holbein's full-scale study for the painting sent to Erasmus. That painting seems not to have survived, though a version in the Louvre is probably an autograph replica made for Warham himself. The fine version at Lambeth Palace is a later sixteenth-century copy. Though it has suffered somewhat from abrasion, the drawing retains both subtlety of modelling and great strength of characterisation. Like other portrait drawings from Holbein's earlier English visit, it is executed on unprimed paper; the studies from the later sojourn were mostly made on paper prepared with a pinkish ground.