'Sir Thomas More' (1527) by Hans Holbein the Younger

In the 15th century, the Italian architect and art theorist, Leon Battista Alberti, wrote, The painter possesses the truly divine power in that not only does he make what is absent present, as they say of friendship, but he also represents the dead to the living. Many centuries later. Welcome to this episode of Cocktails with a Curator. I am Xavier Salomon, Chief Curator at The Frick Collection in New York. And this evening I will talk about a wonderful portrait of Sir Thomas More by Hans Holbein. And I would like to talk exactly about what Alberti says, about how a portrait can make the absent present and can make the dead alive. And at a time where we're all used to our phones, our computers, online platforms making us present with our friends, our loved ones, it is worth thinking about how not so long ago, and several centuries ago as well, people had to rely on portraits to make the absent present. The Sir Thomas More portrait at The Frick is one of the most beloved paintings in the collection. And, of course, Sir Thomas More brings to mind, first of all, his tragic downfall and the period he spent as the Lord Chancellor of England from 1529 and his downfall in the 1530s. He refused to sign the sort of divorce papers for Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. He refused to recognize Anne Boleyn as the new wife of the king. And effectively, having fallen out of royal favor, he is imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1534 and spends the good part of a year at the tower. He was actually imprisoned in this tower, within the Tower of London, the so-called Bell Tower. That's where traditionally Thomas More spent his prison time at the tower. And you see the outside and the inside of the tower in these slides. And on the 6th of July, 1535, he was beheaded on Tower Hill. This is the location where, more or less, Sir Thomas More was beheaded. In 1935, about 400 years after his death, he was canonized. He was made a saint by the Catholic Church and by Pope Leo XIII. So he's now, for the Catholic Church, Saint Thomas More. Because we'll be talking about the Reformation in England and this period of religious issues, I thought to pair the talk today with a Bloody Mary. And, of course, the Bloody Mary was invented in the 1920s in Paris, but it is named after the last Catholic ruling queen of England, Mary I, Henry VIII's daughter, with Catherine of Aragon. And even though Mary is slightly later than Thomas More, I thought this would be an appropriate drink for this evening. Cheers. Henry Clay Frick's relationship with Holbein in fact predates the acquisition of Thomas More. And in 1909, he acquired, in England, this beautiful full-length portrait by Holbein of Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan, who was considered as a potential new wife for the king, Henry VIII, in England. Frick was convinced to have bought the painting and was waiting for an export license from England to America. But the portrait was the center of a very big public debate. And this is a cartoon from around that time showing Uncle Sam with a bag of money trying to take Christina of Denmark away from her frame, therefore away from England. And what happened is that at the very last minute, the painting was saved for the nation. An anonymous donor stepped up and the National Gallery in London managed to keep the painting where it still is today. This obviously hurt very much for Frick, and he was very upset about losing the Christina of Denmark. So he had to console himself a few years later, in 1912, with the acquisition of his very first Holbein, which was the Thomas More, which was acquired in January of 1912, and followed a few years later by the acquisition of a portrait of Thomas More's great rival, Thomas Cromwell. And the two had been hanging across the mantelpiece in the living hall at the Frick since the house was first inhabited by the Frick family in 1914. And here you see them to this day flanking the fireplace, flanking the El Greco St. Jerome, in this wonderful juxtaposition of these great rivals, which is one of the high points at the Frick collection. The portrait is absolutely staggering, and when you look at the details, you realize what it was that made Holbein this beloved artist in Basel first and then in England in the late 1520s and 1530s and onwards. And this is this particular attention to detail which is so celebrated in Northern artists. This is a painting that is painted on a panel, on an oak panel. And here you see More's sort of head with this wonderful cap against this green curtain. You see the chain he has around his neck. This is not the chain of the Lord Chancellor. The painting was done several years before More became Lord Chancellor. This is either a chain that the king gave him when he joined the king's council in 1516 or maybe when he was knighted in 1521. But we know he had a chain which he refused to take off even when he was in his cell at the tower. The details of this painting are extraordinary. Here's the background of this curtain with this rope that casts a shadow on the curtain itself. The textiles, the textures of the different materials is absolutely extraordinary. So he has this sort of wonderful velvet of the red sleeve against the black of the rest of the outfit and the fur that trims the sleeve and it's sort of in the inside of this wonderful coat. And at the bottom left, you also see inscribed in this wooden ledge the date 1527, which is the date when the portrait was painted. Thomas More holds a letter in his hands and we'll see how important letters are for More in a second. And he has this wonderful ring and I love the detail of these hands, such an extraordinary detail. But, of course, the face is absolutely incredible. So the detail of every hair, of his eyebrows, the sort of five o'clock shadow on his face, the sort of growing beard, sort of graying five o'clock shadow, the hair coming out from underneath his cap, it's truly miraculous. When we think of Thomas More today, there are basically two ways of thinking of him and one is the great, gentle, intellectual, the great hero of films like A Man for All Seasons, a film that was done in the 1960s and 1966, with Paul Scofield, who famously depicts Thomas More. And for many people, Thomas More is that character, that sort of wonderful man who falls under the whims of a tyrannical king and dies a martyr at Tower Hill. But more recently, there's been a very different way to think of Thomas More, and this is mostly due to the wonderful novels by Hilary Mantel, her Wolf Hall trilogy, where More appears as a much darker character, a religious fanatic, someone who is pitted against the hero of the novels, Thomas Cromwell, and definitely is more of a villain. Now, where does the truth lie? And I don't really want to get into a lot of that right now, but I think, clearly, More was a bit of both of these characters, and I think he was clearly a rather complex individual with many controversial things that he did during his lifetime. So I don't want to talk too much about More the man, but I would like to think about him slightly separately from his execution, his prison time, his downfall, and think instead about the period around which this portrait was created, around 1527. So this is before he becomes Lord Chancellor, before he falls out with the king at a very different time in his life. Holbein was born in Augsburg in the late 1490s, 1497-98, but as a young man, he moved to Basel in Switzerland, and he worked there within the humanist circles of a number of people. Basel at that time was a great intellectual center in Europe, and the great star of Basel was the philosopher-writer Desiderius Erasmus, the famous author of The Praise of Folly. Erasmus was very good friends with Holbein. Holbein painted a number of portraits of Erasmus. This is the one at Longford Castle in England, where Erasmus is surrounded by some of his books. But Erasmus was also a very good friend of Thomas More, and the two were in constant exchange of letters, and the two were particularly close to each other and even lived together at different points, and Erasmus stayed with Thomas More in London. And we have a wonderful image of this from Erasmus himself, who writes about More. This is what they would do when they were living together. We talk of letters till we fall asleep. Our dreams are dreams of letters, and literature awakens us to begin the new day. So here are these two literary figures, very close friends, and for Erasmus, portraiture was particularly important. He appears in a number of paintings and drawings and medals, and the idea of sharing these portraits among friends is something that Erasmus and Thomas More do. And so it is clear that there was this constant exchange of images to make the absent present. Erasmus is the one who suggests that Holbein should visit London and stay with Thomas More, and Holbein goes to London between the end of 1526 and 1528, and during that period he spends time with Thomas More in his house in Chelsea. And this is where Holbein starts producing a series of unbelievably beautiful drawings. This is the one of Thomas More, most likely done from life, and the painting is then somewhat based on. But he also does seven drawings – well, seven survived, but there were probably more – drawings of the More family. And so here, just to give you two examples, one on the left is John More, who was Thomas's son, only son, and on the right is Anne, who was John's wife. And there are portraits of More's daughters and More's father, and all of these sketches were done in preparation for a very large painting, which showed the family of Thomas More. This was an absolutely extraordinary picture, a huge canvas with life-size figures showing Thomas at the center of his family life, surrounded by his second wife, his kids, his in-laws, in this wonderful depiction of his Chelsea home. And this large painting, unfortunately, survived until the eighteenth century, and in 1752 it was destroyed in a fire in a castle in the Czech Republic. At that time it belonged to Liechtenstein Bishop, and the fire of this residence saw the end, the destruction of this painting. But here you see a drawing for it, probably a preparatory drawing, which was actually then sent to Basel with the inscriptions identifying each person in this scene. And you can see that the drawings, the drawings of the heads of the various members of the More family, now at Windsor, were used for this very large painting, which was probably designed in 1527 as a present for More on his fiftieth birthday. The relationship between the Frick portrait and the large family portrait, both painted the same year, it's somewhat unclear. Was the More painted also for Thomas More, and did he give it to a friend, to someone else? As I said, there was this constant exchange of letters and portraits among friends, humanist friends, and it is likely that this was created for someone and then sent outside of England. We have no trace of the portrait until at least probably the 1580s, 1590s, when the portrait appears for the first time in Rome, in Italy. And from the late 16th century all the way to the mid-19th century, the portrait was in the Crescenzi family collection. The Crescenzi family was an aristocratic family in Rome, and their palace, just next to the Pantheon, was where this portrait was for most of its history. In the mid-1800s, it traveled to England and it was in an English collection, and then Frick acquired it in 1912. When I look at Thomas More in this portrait, I often think of a quote by him, something he wrote in his most famous book, Utopia. And in this treatise about an ideal world, about this island in the middle of the ocean which is the ideal state for Thomas More, in the introduction to that book, More describes his life, which is the life he would have carried out around the time Holbein painted him. Most of my day is taken up by legal affairs. So at one moment I'm pleading a case, at another I'm hearing one, then I'm settling a dispute, and at another handing down a judgment. At the same time, visits must be paid to somebody out of official obligation and to someone else on business matters. Almost the whole day I'm out dealing with others, and what's left I devote to my family, which leaves just nothing for myself, that is, for writing. Naturally, when I get home, I have to talk with my wife and chatter with the children, as well as speak to the servants. All this activity I count as part of my duty, since it has to be done, and so it does unless you want to be a stranger in your own house. Between all these activities that I've described, the days, the months, and the years slip by. So 1527 is the year where Holbein produces this extraordinary painter. For Thomas More, not the politician, not the Christian martyr, not the rebel against the king, but Thomas More, the intellectual, Thomas More, the humanist, the man of letters, who is in correspondence with Erasmus. And this first period of Holbein in England is very different from his second, longer period, when he will come back. Holbein comes back in the 1530s, around the time when Thomas More is falling out of favor, and he then becomes Holbein, the court painter of Henry VIII, and he designed the festivities, the objects for the festivities of his wedding, to amble in, and he then produces many of the royal portraits and the portraits at court. But this is not done at the time of Holbein the courtier. It's done at a time of Holbein, the painter of humanists, of men of letters. And so, to me, this is a great witness of this friendship amongst philosophers and writers in 16th-century Europe, and it always also reminds me of another great quote by Erasmus. Erasmus wrote, saying that, life without a friend, I think, is no life, but rather death. And so here is a witness of these friendships and a reminder of how, in 16th-century Europe, painters would make the absent present. And for us, very much also, make someone dead a long time ago, many centuries ago, very much alive in our imagination. Thank you.