Supriya Ghosh (Editor)

Portrait of Sir Thomas More (Holbein)

Updated on
Edit
Like
Comment
Share on FacebookTweet on TwitterShare on LinkedInShare on Reddit
Year
  
1527

Artist
  
Hans Holbein the Younger

Genre
  
Portrait

Type
  
Oil on oak

Created
  
1527

Portrait of Sir Thomas More (Holbein) lh5ggphtcombFWlKeuZIWK7HTMHYFoHBmNjguufJUH

Dimensions
  
74.2 cm × 59 cm (29.2 in × 23 in)

Locations
  
Frick Collection, National Portrait Gallery, London

Periods
  
Northern Renaissance, Renaissance, German Renaissance

Media
  
Paint, Wood, Oil paint, Oak

Similar
  
Hans Holbein the Younger artwork, Artwork at Frick Collection

Portrait of Sir Thomas More is an oak panel painting commissioned in 1527 of Thomas More by the German artist and printmaker Hans Holbein the Younger, now in the Frick Collection in New York.

The work was created during the period from 1526 when Holbein lived in London. He gained the friendship of the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, who recommended that he befriend More, then a powerful, knighted speaker at the English Parliament.

A closely related, though probably not directly preparatory, drawing with bodycolour is in the Royal Collection, and there is a copy in the National Portrait Gallery, probably "painted in Italy or Austria in the early seventeenth century". Possibly this is the version catalogued in the Leuchtenberg Gallery in 1852.

Another Holbein portrait of More, part of a large group portrait of his family, is now lost, but several drawings (also mostly in the Royal Collection) and copies survive.

References

Portrait of Sir Thomas More (Holbein) Wikipedia