Portraits Art: Henry VIII, King of England

With a letter in hand from the humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam, Holbein first approached Sir Thomas More. The artist executed a number of portraits for More and others of standing before returning to the Continent in 1528. Four years later, Holbein was back in England. To his previous patrons, he now added the German merchants of London’s Hanseatic League, and in short time, had made his way to the court of Henry VIII, where he worked across a wide range of genres and media, creating backdrops for ephemeral spectacle, designs for metalwork and jewelry, prints, murals, and miniatures, as well as easel portraits.

This iconic image of Henry VIII is perhaps the artist’s best-known work today. Ironically, like other existing copies of the portrait, it cannot be firmly tied to the artist’s hand and is possibly a workshop production. All of these images, however, are ultimately based on Holbein’s original prototype, a no longer extant mural in Whitehall Palace created circa 1537. A partial cartoon (a drawing by which the artist transferred the design onto the wall) that survives from the Whitehall project shows the king with the same impossibly broad shoulders, dressed in the same finery, and holding the same accessories as in the portrait seen here. The only difference is that Henry, who is shown full-length in the cartoon, stands on a slight diagonal. His head, thus, appears in three-quarters view. The ubiquity of the fully frontal Henry as represented by the current work and later copies of the Whitehall mural itself, however, suggests that Holbein might, in the final stages, have adjusted the king’s position for greater impact.

Karel van Mander, who saw the Whitehall mural in the early seventeenth century before it was destroyed in a fire, wrote that the king appeared “so majestic in his splendor that the spectator felt abashed, annihilated in his presence.” On the wall of the palace, Henry’s image was part of a larger dynastic scene in which the king’s parents, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, and his third wife, Jane Seymour, also appeared. As an independent portrait, the image of the king does not lose its effect. Henry’s elaborate clothing and jewelry show him as a gentleman of wealth and magnificence. His massive body, filling the canvas, proclaims him as a force to be reckoned with. A Latin inscription on the portrait puts the king’s age at 49, suggesting a date for the work of 1540. By that point in his life, Henry had already waged several wars, declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England, and married five of his six wives, divorcing two of them and beheading another.

The replication of this work suggests that it was used as the king’s official portrait. As such, it would have hung in the portrait galleries of Henry’s noble subjects and foreign allies.