Miniaturporträt von Margaret Roper

In July 1535 Henry VIII had Thomas More beheaded for refusing to accept the king as head of the church in England. Holbein owed his English career to More, who had taken him in and opened doors at court years before. Within months of the execution he painted this portrait of More's eldest daughter, Margaret Roper, a woman famous in her own right as one of the finest scholars in England. It is astonishingly small, under two inches across, painted on vellum stuck to a playing card, and she holds a little book to mark her learning. It hangs beside a matching miniature of her husband. Margaret is said to have bribed the guards to take her father's severed head down from London Bridge, and to have kept it until she died nine years later.