Portrait of an Englishman

We no longer know who this man was. Holbein painted him in London around 1540, during the years he spent as a portraitist to England's court and its wealthy foreigners, and somewhere along the way the sitter's name dropped out of the record. What is left is his bearing and his belongings, a fur-lined coat, a pair of gloves held in one hand, and a folded letter in the other, the ordinary props of a merchant or an official who lived by correspondence and trade. Holbein gives him a plain background and his full attention, the same close, unflattering scrutiny he brought to sitters whose names we still know. The title the picture carries now, simply the portrait of an Englishman, is the museum's honest admission that the paper trail ran out.