Portrait of an Unknown Gentleman

For a long time the man in this small panel was called Thomas More, the English chancellor Henry the Eighth had executed in 1535. The face here does not match the More we know from Hans Holbein's celebrated portrait, now in New York, so the old name has quietly fallen away. What remains is the hand that made it: Holbein's Basel workshop, working around 1540, when Holbein himself was court painter in London and northern portraiture prized exactly this kind of cool, close attention. The sitter meets you at half length, plainly dressed, set against a flat ground that throws every bit of weight onto the features. His name is lost, and yet the type of image, the sober record of one real person's face, is exactly what Holbein's circle carried across Europe.