Portrait of a Young Merchant

By 1541 Holbein had spent years in London as painter to Henry the Eighth's court, but he also kept painting the German merchants of the Steelyard, the Hanseatic trading colony on the Thames where he had found some of his first English clients. This young man, turned to one side and looking out at us, is one of them. Along the top the painter lettered the year in gold, 1541, and the sitter's age, 28, though the man's name has since been lost. He wears a black fur-lined cloak over brown silk against a plain blue-grey wall. It is one of the last portraits Holbein finished before plague took him in London two years later.