Hans Holbein the Younger Augsburg 1497/8 - 1543 London

Presumably painted for Sir Thomas Wyatt Senior, and thence presumably by inheritance to his son;
Probably dispersed upon the execution of the sitter in 1554;
Anonymous sale, London, Christie's, 22 November 1974, lot 152 (as English School, circa 1550), where acquired by the present owner.

R. Strong, Holbein: the Complete Paintings, 1980, no. 132 (as by Holbein);
J. Rowlands, Holbein. The Paintings of Hans Holbein the Younger, Oxford 1985, p. 134, under cat. no. 29 (referring without comment to Strong above, but not included in the list of either autograph or rejected works);
B. Brinkmann, in B. Brinkmann & S. Kemperdick, Deutsche Gemälde im Städel 1500-1550, Mainz 2005, pp. 438-9, reproduced fig. 378 (as by Holbein);
R. Strong, "In search of Holbein's Thomas Wyatt the Younger", in Apollo, March 2006, pp. 48-56, reproduced (as by Holbein).

This is a recently rediscovered late portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger, painted in London between 1539 and 1542, of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger at the age of about twenty.

The Sitter
Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger of Allington Castle in Kent, was born into the most cultivated circle of the English Tudor Court.  His grandfather, Sir Henry Wyatt, who bought Allington in 1492, had entered the service of Henry Tudor some time before 1483, and was privy councillor to Henry VII, and guardian, and later Treasurer to the Chamber to Henry VIII, retiring in 1528, but remaining close to the King until his death in 1537.  Henry Wyatt was the first member of the family to sit to Holbein, and the portrait survives in the Louvre.  Though it used to be thought to have been painted during Holbein's first visit to England, a recent dendrochronology has shown that it is unlikely to have been painted before 1535, and thus shows Sir Henry as an old man of 65, two years before his death¹. 

The present sitter's father, also Sir Thomas Wyatt, was an important figure in Henry VIII's court.  he was appointed Clerk of the King's Jewels in 1524, was sworn of the Council in 1533, and was knighted four years later.  Thomas Wyatt Senior had travelled widely in Italy, Spain and France, and became a celebrated poet.  As well as writing his own poems (he is credited, along with his much younger friend Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, with introducing the sonnet verse form to England), he made translations, including the earliest rendering into English of Petrarch's sonnets.  More controversially, he was the lifelong friend, and probably the lover of Anne Boleyn, daughter of one of his father's closest friends, for whom it is believed several of his love poems were written.  He seems to have confessed his intimacy with her to Henry VIII and to have warned him against marrying her.  Subsequently he was briefly imprisoned in the Tower, after Anne's post-nuptial infidelities had been discovered, and the fall of Thomas Cromwell, but his detention was only in order that he might serve as a witness against her.  In April 1537 he was appointed Ambassador to the Emperor, and remained abroad until April 1539, but was abroad again, in the Low Countries, from December of that year until sometime in 1540.  He was on intimate terms with Sir Thomas More, and like his father, his sister, his son, and perhaps his daughter-in-law, he sat to Holbein.  He died of a fever in Sherbourne in Dorset in the early autumn of 1642.

Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger, the eldest and only surviving son of his father and Elizabeth, daughter of Lord Cobham, was a headstrong young man, who seems to have been possessed of a volatile and ardent character, and whose instinct for trouble led to his early death on the scaffold.  He was raised as a Catholic, but, perhaps due to his father's rough treatment at the hands of the Inquisition during an Embassy to Spain in 1536 when he is believed to have accompanied his father, nurtured a deep loathing for the Catholic Spaniards.   Painted about 1540, the present portrait was probably commissioned by his father, and as we shall see, its form reflects his father's erudite tastes.  Nonetheless, it also reveals something of the ardour and determination of this difficult young man.  Wyatt the Younger was an only son, and his father's influence, of which we have evidence in for example, the latter's letters of moral advice to his son, written in from Spain 1537, may explain why we hear little of him until after his father's death, even though he married, in 1537, when barely sixteen years old.  Early in his life, probably around the time of this portrait, he fell under the influence of his father's younger friend Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey ("the most foolish proud boy in the Kingdom"), and in the year after his father's death in 1542 the two young hotheads were fined for breaking the windows of the city's churches and for eating meat in Lent, an attempt, as Surrey explained, to awaken the citizens to a sense of sin.  That same year Wyatt joined a regiment that Surrey had formed to fight in France.  He plainly had a natural aptitude for fighting, since in 1545 we find Surrey writing to Henry VIII of Wyatt's "hardness, painfulness, circumspection and natural disposition to the war".

His well-nurtured visceral antipathy to Catholic Spain surfaced in 1553, when, only seven days after the announcement of Queen Mary's mooted marriage to Philip II of Spain, and at the instigation of of Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devonshire, he raised a militia drawn from his Kentish friends and neighbours and, supported by men from the garrison at Rochester Castle and armed with cannon and gunpowder smuggled from London up the Medway, he made plans to march on London and seize it.  When news reached the Queen she immediately announced an official pardon to all those who would desert him within 24 hours, and swiftly arranged for Royal officers to disperse bands of insurgents on their way to join Wyatt's insurrection.  Wyatt buoyed up dwindling morale in his ranks by promising support from France, and circulated false rumours of successful uprisings in other districts.  He was able to defeat the Duke of Norfolk's troops sent to crush him, and at the head of 4,000 men he marched on London, camping on Blackheath in sight of the City on January 29th, 1554.  Queen Mary urged the citizenry to take up arms against Wyatt, whom she declared a traitor, and some 20,000 did so.  Wyatt marched from Southwark to Kingston, where he crossed the Thames on Shrove Tuesday, February 6th, and marched thence on St. James' Palace.  Harried from Kensington to Hyde Park, with his followers dwindling rapidly in number, he arrived via Charing Cross, The Strand and Fleet Street at a fortifed Ludgate on February 8th, and gave himself up to the Norroy Herald at Temple Bar.  He was taken to Whitehall, and thence to to the Tower of London, and was arraigned for High Treason at Westminster on March 15th and sentenced to death.  From the scaffold on Tower Hill on April 11th he spoke to the crowd, shouldering full blame for his rebellion.  He was executed, and his head sent to adorn the gallows on Hay Hill (other parts being dispersed to decorate salient locations), but on April 17th it was stolen.

Wyatt had married in 1537 Jane, daughter of Sir Thomas Hawte, of Bishopsbourne in Kent, by whom he had ten children, of whom three married and left issue, including a son George, father of Sir Francis Wyatt, the first Governor of Virginia.

Dating and Context
Since Wyatt was born in 1521, and Holbein died in 1543, the present portrait, as Brinkmann and Strong have observed,² must date from Holbein's last years.  Wyatt is depicted here as a young man, but he is unlikely to have been younger than 18 when he sat to Holbein, so a dating to circa 1539-43 is likely: Brinkmann dates the Wyatt portrait to circa 1540 or shortly after, and Strong to about 1541³.  Given the strong likelihood that it was commissioned by his father, it is unlikely to date from before Wyatt the Elder's return to England in April 1539, and almost certainly precedes the latter's death in 1542.  Both Brinkmann and Strong compare it with Holbein's profile portrait of Simon George of Cornwall in the Städel, Frankfurt,⁴ which is generally dated circa 1535-40, but which Brinkmann now dates more precisely, to circa 1538-9.  In comparing the two profile portraits, Brinkmann points out a number of close similarities between them.  The Städel portrait is on a tondo panel of an almost identical diameter to the original dimensions of the present picture.  Of other close similarities beween the picture which he lists in detail, Brinkmann singles out the modelling of the flesh, the almost identical handling of the eye and the area below it, the ear, and the strikingly similar depiction of the neck, albeit partly clothed in the Städel portrait.

The Städel portrait however is not seen in full profile, since Simon George's head is turned slightly towards the viewer.  Holbein did however portray Simon George in full profile in a drawing, presumably used for the painting, in Windsor Castle, Royal Library.⁵  Wyatt is depicted in the present picture in full profile, with his neck cut off at the shoulders in an entirely unconscious anticipation of his eventual fate.  Full profile portraits are rare in Holbein's painted oeuvre, but less so in his drawn portraits.  In addition to Holbein's drawing of Simon George, two other drawn portraits at Windsor Castle depict their sitters in full profile.⁶  All three are of Courtiers at Henry VIII's Court, and one, of the poet Nicholas Bourbon the Elder, is further recorded in a profile woodcut portrait after Holbein's design.⁷  Thus the preference for full-profile portrayal would seem to have been to the Court taste.

Holbein's method of depicting Wyatt the Younger differs from his other drawn and painted profile portraits (and from those of his father), in that it wilfully evokes an Antique cameo.  Such a means of portrayal is not surprising within the cultured confines of the English Renaissance Court.  A woodcut portrait after Holbein of Sir Thomas Wyatt Senior, also portraying the poet in profile (see fig. 1), and in classical dress, is accompanied by a text referring to it in terms of the Antique: 'Hobenus nitida pingendi maximus arte/ effigiem expressit graphice: sed nullus Apelles/ exprimet ungenium animumque Viati'.  The woodcut was published in Naenia in mortem Thomae Viati equitis incomparabilis, the valediction of Wyatt written by his friend John Leland and published in London in 1542, the year of his death.  Leland records that "Sir Thomas Wyatt's favourite ring, with which he always sealed his letters, was a beautiful gem with Julius Caesar's head cut on an agate.  Wyatt's predeliction for it arose from his admiration of Caesar's character and he uses it that the memory of so great a man being so constantly present to his mind he might himself be stimulated in generous exercise and do something worthy of eternal record".⁸  Given that Wyatt the Elder was probably responsible for the commission of his son's portrait, his choice of so explicitly Classical a context for the present portrayal: as an ad exemplum antique portrait; is hardly surprising.  As the Holbein scholar Sir Roy Strong has written (private communication) of the present portrait: "here is a most startlingly severe recreation in paint of an antique gem or medal applied to the son of a Tudor Court poet, who was responding to the Renaissance cult of the antique portrait as an exemplum.  In the rediscovered portrait of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger, we are dealing not only with a superb, late portrait of Holbein, but with an image rich in association with the arrival of Renaissance ideals in early 16th Century England".  More recently he wrote that it is 'Holbein's most uncompromising tribute to the antique world, in which the portrait assumes the quality almost of a scuptured relief.  In terms of English portraiture this picture is unprecedented, a major landmark in every way in the reception of the new renaissance ideals at the court of Henry VIII'.⁹

No painting of Sir Thomas Wyatt Senior by Holbein survives, but three copies record one or more presumed originals, in each of which Wyatt is portrayed in a tondo in a similar manner to the woodcut, but in reverse,¹⁰ and in one of them, he is portrayed as in classical dress, with his neck and shoulders bared, the top of a toga-like garment visible below.¹¹

The present sitter's father and grandfather, and almost certainly his aunt, and possibly also his wife, sat to Holbein.  His portrait of Sir Henry Wyatt, in the Louvre, Paris, was until recently thought to have dated from Holbein's first visit to England, but recent dendrochronology has shown that it cannot have been painted before 1535, thus compressing into a period of no more than six years Holbein's work for three generations of Wyatts).¹²  No paintings of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder have survived, but in addition to the three copies after Holbein listed above, a portrait drawing (and a copy after it) survives in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, which presupposes the existence of a painting, now lost.¹³  A probable portrait of Sir Henry's daughter Margaret, Lady Lee, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, is no longer thought to be by Holbein himself, although its design presumably originated with him.¹⁴  Finally, Roy Strong has suggested that a portrait drawing at Windsor, inscribed Anna Bollein Queen, but bearing on the reverse the Wyatt arms, might rather depict Jane, daughter of Sir William Hawte of Bishopsbourne, who married Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger in 1537.¹⁵  Such a group of portrait paintings and drawings and copies of lost originals suggests a strong connection between the Wyatt family and Holbein, such that the absence of a portrait of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger would be strange.  

Versions
Of the three other known versions of the present picture, none are thought to be by Holbein, and are regarded by Strong as copies.¹⁶  They are as follows:-
1.  The Fry version (see fig. 2).
On panel, tondo, 33 cm. diameter.  This painting bears Charles I's brand mark on the reverse, but cannot be traced in the Van der Doort inventories or the Commonwealth sale.  It was bought by Mrs Francis Gibson (née Wyatt) from Horatio Rodd, a picture dealer, in 1847, and then passed into the collection of the Rt. Hon. Lewis Fry (1832-1921).  It remains in the possession of his descendants.
2.  The Earls of Romney version (see fig. 3).
On panel, tondo, 39.5 cm. diameter.  It is one of a group of Wyatt portraits and family papers in the collection of the Earls of Romney, and almost certainly descended in the family of the sitter, since Sir Thomas Wyatt's great-granddaughter Elizabeth married Thomas Bosville of Little Mote, Einsford, Kent, whose daughter and sole heir Margareta married Sir Robert Marsham, 4th Bt., parents of Robert, 1st Baron Romney.
3.  The National Portrait Gallery version (inv. no. 3331).
On panel, painted tondo, 34.3 by 33 cm.  It first appeared in the sale of Mrs. M. Berryman, Great Chesterford, Essex, London, Christie's, 24 March 1937.  This is probably a 17th Century copy, but is of documentary interest, since it records the present picture after it had been let into its curious panel construction.  It bears the Wyatt coat-of-arms, thus confirming the identity of the sitter.

It is more than likely that other copies also exist.

The history of the versions
The Wyatt family portraits were dispersed over various branches of the family, and it has not been hitherto possible to establish a link between any of them and the anonymous 1974 sale, when the present picture surfaced.  The sitter's widow, Jane Hawte, Lady Wyatt, was left destitute in 1554, when she was granted an annuity by Queen Mary.  The following year some of the Wyatt lands in Kent were restored to her. It is quite likely that the original portraits by Holbein were dispersed upon Sir Thomas Wyatt's death, but Sir Roy Strong has succeeded in mapping a likely line of descent for other versions of them.  The sitter's son, Sir George Wyatt, was born in the year of his father's death, but became heir in 1570 when the last of his elder brothers, Arthur, died.  In the same year the Wyatts were restored to the blood, and Sir George lived at Boxley Abbey, Kent, which, with Wavering, was part of the Wyatt lands restored to him by Queen Elizabeth in 1570.  Sir George was obsessed by what had happened to his family and set about restoring its fortunes and lifting the stigma of treason.  He began collecting family papers, and writing treatises, including The History of the Defence of Anne Boleyn, composed after 1603.  This describes an anti-papal allegory in the form of a maze that Sir Thomas Senior had drawn on the wall of his lodging in Rome in 1527.  Sir George commissioned a painting of this, which was formerly on the reverse of the copy of the Holbein of Sir Thomas Wyatt Senior in the collection of his descendants, the Earls of Romney.¹⁷  It is as Roy Strong has suggested a reasonable assumption that this picture with its reverse, and the Romney version of the present portrait, and other family portraits were commissioned as part of Sir George's efforts to rehabilitate his family.¹⁸  After Sir George's death in 1623, the main group of portraits was inherited by his son, Sir Francis Wyatt (c.1575-1644), Governor of Virginia; thence to his son Edwin Wyatt, Justice of the Peace, a Recorder, and M.P. for Maidstone; thence to his eldest son, Thomas Wyatt, great-great-grandson of the sitter. George Vertue records them twice when in his possession: in 1725 and in the Wyatt house in Charterhouse Yard in circa 1744-45.¹⁹  The 1725 entry records among other portraits: Sr. Tho Wyatt a profil long stiff beard.  in a round on bord.  Sr. Tho Wyatt. Jun. a profil. in a round, on bord.  The first of these is presumably the Romney copy of the lost tondo portrait of Sir Thomas Wyatt Senior.  Twenty years later Vertue lists them both again:  Sr.. Tho. Wyatt Kt . the Elder - the poet.  died at Sherbourne his son.  Sr . Tho - Junior.  a profil.  his head - sd to be painted in Italy ...  The all'antica character of the present composition may perhaps explain why, as Vertue records, the version he saw was said to have been painted in Italy.  The Wyatt line died out with Francis Wyatt (died 1746) and George Wyatt (died 1753).  The portraits passed to the descendants of their aunt, Virginia, grandmother of the 1st Earl of Romney, and thence by descent to the present day.

The Romney portraits thus provide, as Roy Strong has shown, evidence that Sir George Wyatt knew the original, or that he knew earlier copies, and since they include a portrait of Anne Boleyn, he probably knew them as late as 1603.²⁰  The portraits of Sir Thomas Wyatt Senior and Junior appear in the 1590 inventory of John, 1st Baron Lumley, but like some of the other Lumley portraits, are without attribution: "Of old sir Thomas Wyatt/ Of the yonger sir Thomas Wiat executed".²¹

It is of course no more than conjecture that Sir George Wyatt had the Romney portraits copied from the Lumley ones, nor that the Lumley ones were the originals, especially since the Fry version has the brand mark on the reverse of Charles I.  A comparison between the present picture and the Romney and Fry copies is however more telling.  The present portrait fills the roundel on which it is painted, with little gap between the head at the top and the neck at the bottom and the edge.  The Fry version has a greater gap between portrait and edge of panel, and the Romney version a yet larger gap.  The Städel portrait of Simon George, by comparison, also extends close the the edges of the tondo panel.  On the basis of this evidence, Roy Strong has suggested that Sir George Wyatt had the Romney version copied from the Fry version, then in the possession of Sir John Lumley, and subsequently in the collection of Charles I, which was a copy of the present original.²²   

Underdrawing
Infra-red reflectography has revealed beautiful extensive underdrawing (see fig. 4).  This was not drawn with a free hand, but as was Holbein's usual practice, transferred from a finished preparatory drawing by means of tracing.  A comparison between the infra-red reflectographs of the underdrawing of the three versions is instructive in this regard.  The Fry version (see fig. 5) has marked hatching, a technique that Holbein never used.  This makes it clear that the Fry picture was not based on a transferred design: certainly not one of a type of tracing from a preparatory drawing used by Holbein or his workshop, and probably not from any transferred design.  The Romney version (fig. 6) has more linear underdrawing, but it too is not of a type to be associated with Holbein.

The panel and state of preservation
Fig. 7 shows the present work as it was in 1974.  It was substantially overpainted, and bore the inscription: Henry 6.  Very long ago, indeed on the evidence of the National Portrait Gallery version (see below) in the 17th Century or before, the original tondo was shaved to a veneer and mounted in another panel.  As a presumed result of this process it was trimmed at the left and right sides, and these were then made up with strips of wood.  These segments extend about 1 cm. to the left and 2 cm. to the right.  While most of the original painted surface, albeit abraded in parts, is to be seen in the sitter's head and neck, the background has several phases of overpaint.  A cross-section of the background (see fig. 8) reveals from back to front: the secondary oak panel support, the veneer of original panel, the original ground layer, an original background of azurite (blue), a dark brown film, and then several layers of predominently blue overpaint.  Detailed condition reports are avaialble on request.

1.  See Strong, under Literature (2006), p. 50, reproduced p. 51, fig. 5.
2.  See Strong, op. cit., under Literature.
3.  Brinkmann, under Literature, p. 439; Strong, op. cit., p. 56.
4.  Brinkmann, op. cit., pp. 430-44, reproduced in colour fig. 369.
5.  Brinkmann, ibid., reproduced fig. 373.
6.  See K.T. Parker, The Drawings of Hans Holbein...at Windsor Castle, Oxford & London 1945, pp. 45-6, cat. nos. 34, 35, 37, all reproduced.
7.  Parker, op. cit., reproduced p. 46, fig. XVII.
8.  John Leland, Collectanea, London 1770, vol. V, p. 172.
9.  Strong, op. cit., p. 56.
10.  Two are in the National Portrait Gallery and one is in the collection of the Earls of Romney; see Strong, ibid., p. 51, reproduced p. 52, figs. 8-10.
11.  idem, fig. 8.
12.  Inv. 1347; see Strong, ibid., p. 50, reproduced p. 51, fig. 5.
13.  See Parker, op. cit., pp. 53-4, nos 64 and 65, reproduced; and Strong, ibid., p. 50, reproduced p. 52, fig. 6.
13.  Strong, ibid., p. 51, reproduced p. 53, fig. 14 (now thought to be a copy).
15. idem, p. 51, reproduced p. 53, figs. 11 and 12.
16. idem, pp. 51-6, reproduced figs. 17-19.
17. idem, pp. 53-4, reproduced figs. 15 and 9.
18.  idem, p. 54.
19.  George Vertue, "Notebooks, vol. I", in The Walpole Society, vol. XVII, 1929-30, pp. 154, 160, vol. V, 1937-8, pp. 38-9.
20.  Strong, op. cit., p. 54, reproduced p. 56, fig. 20.
21.  L. Cust, "The Lumley Inventories", in The Walpole Society, vol. VI, 1918, p. 24, cited in Strong, p. 56.
22.  Strong, op. cit., p. 54.