Portrait of Thomas Cromwell

Common card · No. 463715

Portrait of Thomas Cromwell is a small oil painting by the German-Swiss artist Hans Holbein the Younger. It is usually dated to between 1532 and 1534, when Cromwell, an English lawyer and statesman who served as chief minister to King Henry VIII of England from 1532 to 1540, was around 48 years old. It is one of two portraits Holbein painted of him; the other is a tondo from a series of medallions of Tudor courtiers. Holbein became a court painter for the English crown in 1532, under the patronage of Cromwell and Anne Boleyn and was King's Painter to Henry VIII by 1535. This portrait was commissioned by Cromwell, whom art historians assume asked that he was portrayed in a modest fashion, in contrast to the artist's other English court paintings, which tend to be lavish and flattering. The original panel is lost, and today known from three copies: in the Frick Collection in New York, an early seventeenth-century version in the National Portrait Gallery in London, and in the Chichester Constable...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Hans Holbein the Younger, Public domain