Portrait of Henry VIII

Around 1537 Holbein was painting a life-size mural of Henry VIII in the Palace of Whitehall, the king standing with his parents and his third wife, Jane Seymour. This panel, just 28 centimetres tall, dates from about the same time, and the costume matches the mural closely: the jewelled black cap with its white plume, the doublet with white puffs drawn through its slits, the heavy collar of gold and red stones. The pose is different. Henry still turns a little to one side, as in Holbein's full-size drawing for the wall, before the painter brought him round to face the viewer head-on. The mural burned with most of Whitehall in 1698, and this is now the only surviving painting of Henry generally accepted as by Holbein himself. It hung for many years with the Spencer family at Althorp, and in 1934 it joined the collection of Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza.