Portrait of John Chambers

John Chambre was about 73 when Holbein painted him in 1543, so the inscription on the background, giving his age as 88, is simply wrong. It went in when the background was renewed at some later date. Chambre was one of Henry VIII's physicians, and in 1518 he had been among the founders of the College of Physicians in London. Holbein studied his face for another commission too, the large group of the king handing a charter to the barber-surgeons of London, where Chambre appears among the royal doctors. That group was still unfinished when Holbein died in London in the autumn of 1543, and this panel is one of the last portraits he completed. It later belonged to the collection of the Earl of Arundel, the great English collector, before passing to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm.