Portrait of Sir Thomas More

Portrait of Sir Thomas More
Artist	Hans Holbein the Younger
Year	1527
Type	Oil on oak
Dimensions	74.2 cm × 59 cm (29.2 in × 23 in)
Location	Frick Collection, New York

Detail of Tudor rose on the Collar of Esses livery chain

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.^[1]

A closely related, though probably not directly preparatory, drawing with bodycolour is in the Royal Collection,^[2] and there is a copy in the National Portrait Gallery, probably "painted in Italy or Austria in the early seventeenth century".^[3] 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.^[4]

Notes[]

External video
Hans Holbein, the Younger, Sir Thomas More, Frick Collection[5]

Sources[]

• Bätschmann, Oskar & Griener, Pascal. Hans Holbein. Reaktion Books, 1999. ISBN 1-86189-040-0
• Frick Collection, The Frick Collection: an Illustrated Catalogue, vol. 1 (Paintings), Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1968, 228–233.

Further reading[]

• Mantel, Hilary and Salomon, Xavier F., Holbein's Sir Thomas More. The Frick Collection, 2018. ISBN 978-1-907804-91-5