Thomas Cromwell

When Holbein came back to England in 1532, this was one of the first faces he painted, and it belonged to the most powerful commoner in the kingdom. Thomas Cromwell was Henry VIII's chief minister, the man engineering the break with Rome that would make Henry head of the English church. Holbein shows him plainly, without flattery: a heavy-set man in dark clothes at a table, a letter addressed to him as Master of the Jewel House, a prayer book at his elbow. It is a deliberately severe image of a working administrator. Cromwell fell as fast as he rose and was beheaded in 1540, and Holbein's original panel disappeared soon after. The version in the Frick in New York is the finest of the few that survive.