Porträt des William Warham

Holbein painted this in 1527, during his first stay in England, and it grew out of a gift between friends. The old Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, had been sent a portrait of the scholar Erasmus that Holbein made, and he answered it by sitting for the same young artist so his own likeness could travel back the other way. Warham was near 77, the most senior churchman in England, and Holbein gives him tired, heavy-lidded eyes and quiet folded hands, a bishop's mitre resting on the ledge beside him. Within a few years Henry VIII would break with Rome and remake that church from the top. Warham died in 1532, months before the English clergy formally submitted to the king.