Sir Thomas More

Hans Holbein painted Thomas More in London in 1527, when More was a rising royal servant and Henry VIII still trusted him. Eight years later Henry had him beheaded for refusing to accept the king as head of the church in England. Rubens made this panel about a century after Holbein's sitting, working from that portrait, and he changed things. Holbein's More wears a heavy gold chain of office and sits before a green curtain. Rubens dropped both. What is left is the fur-lined gown, the red velvet sleeves, the folded paper in the hands and a face turning towards the light. Rubens knew the humanist world More belonged to from the inside, through his own brother Philip, who had studied with the scholar Justus Lipsius in Leuven. The panel was in a private collection in Antwerp by 1652, and by 1746 it hung in Isabel de Farnesio's rooms at the palace of La Granja, where the white number 974 in the lower corner was given to it.