Портрет Иоганна фон Шварцвальдта

1543 was Holbein's last year. He was in London, painting for a court where Henry VIII had just married his sixth wife, and he died there that autumn. This portrait carries that date, and it is very small, about five centimetres across, tempera on parchment, the kind of thing made to be held in the hand rather than hung on a wall. The inscription beside the head gives the sitter's age as 24, which does not fit the Danzig merchant the picture is named after, and other candidates have been put forward since. The object itself stayed in Danzig a long time. A family bequest left it to one of the city churches in 1708, and by 1902 it was in the city museum. German forces removed it from there in 1943, the Red Army took it east in 1945, and it is now in Moscow, among the works Poland has formally asked to have returned.