Derich Born

In 1533 Holbein was back in London, and some of his sharpest portraits from these years are not of Henry the Eighth's court at all but of German merchants. Derich Born was one of them, a 23-year-old from Cologne who sold military supplies to the English crown and lived in the Steelyard, the walled riverside compound where the Hanseatic traders kept their own community. Along the stone parapet Holbein set a Latin boast: add a voice and this would be Born himself, and you would wonder whether the painter or his father made the man. Recent cleaning found that Holbein sharpened those cheekbones as he worked, layer over layer, quietly tightening the young merchant's jaw.