Portrait Miniature of Mrs Jane Small, formerly Mrs Pemberton

The portrait miniature had existed in England for about a decade when this one was painted, grown out of the illuminators' craft and made, until then, almost entirely for people at court. Holbein was working for Henry VIII's circle in these years, the years of Anne Boleyn's fall. The sitter had nothing to do with any of that. She was Jane Small, daughter of a Northamptonshire gentleman and wife of a London cloth merchant, and the Smalls lived close to Holbein in the City. She appears against flat blue in black and white, a red flower between her fingers and two ears of corn at her breast, and nobody knows what the occasion was. The V and A dates the miniature to about 1536, though an inscription giving her age as 23 has led others towards 1540. Behind the vellum sits a playing card, which is what it was painted on.