Abstract
Hans Holbein is one of those artists who almost persuades us that there is something in Thomas Carlyle’s assertion that a good portrait ‘is superior in real instruction to half a dozen written biographies’. From the best copy of Holbein’s lost portrait of Thomas Cromwell we get the sense that we could recognise Cromwell on sight as he was in his late forties in 1534.1 But the portrait is more than a likeness. Holbein presents the details which make the observer cast Cromwell not only as a character but also as an actor in a particular role. The artist makes a psychological and a social estimate of his sitter.
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Notes
Roy Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits (HMSO 1969), I, 114.
John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1870), ed. J. Pratt, V, 395.
R.B. Merriman, Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell (Oxford 1902), I, 373.
Ibid., II, 162.
Ibid., II, 129.
P. Hughes, The Reformatiion in England (1951), I, 328, n.2.
C.S.L. Davies, Peace, Print and Protestantism (1976), 159; L.P., VII, 556–6; IX, 156–7;
P. Van Dyke, Renascence Portraits (1906), 234.
John Stow, A Survey of London (Oxford 1908), ed. C.L. Kingsford, 88–9.
William Roper, ‘The Life of Sir Thomas More’, ed. E.V. Hitchcock, EETS, Original Series, CXCVII (1935), 71, 81.
L. Gottesman, Four Political Treatises of Sir Thomas Elyot (Florida 1967), 206.
Shakespeare in his own Age (Cambridge 1964), ed. A. Nicoll, 233–5.
G.R. Elton, Reform & Renewal (Cambridge 1973), 17.
Thomas Elyot, The Boke called the Governour (Everyman 1907), 1617.
Charles Wriothesley, ‘Chronicle’, ed. W.D. Hamilton, Camden Soc., New Series, XI (1875), 117.
Ibid., 96–7; Stow, A Survey of London, I, 91.
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© 1978 B.W. Beckingsale
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Beckingsale, B.W. (1978). Cromwell’s Portrait. In: Thomas Cromwell. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-01664-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-01664-8_1
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