Portrait of Sir Thomas More

The subtractive test, element by element, in a field that holds very few. The face cannot go: it is the picture. The collar of SS cannot go: it is the one thing in the field that names whom this man serves, and it lies across the fur where the eye drops from the face. The red velvet sleeves cannot go: they are the one warm mass among black, fur and green, and they hold the lower half up to the head. The paper is the office, letters and business in one object. What yields is the curtain, needed as a ground but a convention carried from Basel, which another plain ground would serve almost as well; the hands, too, are placed more than needed. Little is idle, and little was at risk.

Score: 8.3 / 10

What the panel brings into the open can be stated. A man of intellect wears power as a weight he has taken on: the collar of service lies on him as a chain lies, heavy gold links on fur, and the face above it is turned inward, alert, unsmiling, the jaw unshaven. The public self and the private mind are shown in one figure and neither is sacrificed; the counsellor and the scholar share a body. That is a meaning, not a mood, and it holds outside Henry’s court. What holds the axis at 8.0 is how much of what viewers find is brought to the panel: the conscience that went to the scaffold in 1535 is in the history, not in the paint. The disclosure is real and narrow.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Elevation of one kind, gravity: a presence so complete that the panel seems less a picture than a person kept. The height is met in the face, modelled with a steadiness that holds attention without any gesture, and in the sleeves, whose red seems to give off the warmth of the cloth itself; it recurs only in the detail, the links of the collar, the fur, the light on the knuckles. There is no transport, no terror and no grandeur of scale: the panel is about seventy-four centimetres high and asks for nearness, not awe. The response it earns is respect and a kind of hush, sustained across the whole field rather than climbing to a summit. High in the portrait’s kind, and narrow in range.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Myth evoked, and built only in the collar. The archetype most viewers bring is the man of conscience before the king, the counsellor who will not bend; that figure is supplied by 1535 and by the saint’s cult, and the panel does not build it. What the panel builds is smaller: the collar of the king’s livery laid over the scholar’s robe, so that service and bondage are one object. That is an old figure, the bound counsellor, and it is load-bearing in the composition, which drops the eye from the face to the chain. The particulars stay wholly particular: one man, one year, a paper, his stubble. The archetypal is a reading the portrait permits and history performs.

Score: 7.2 / 10

The inheritance is wide and plain: the Netherlandish half-length portrait of Van Eyck, Massys and the masters of Bruges and Antwerp; the Italianate gravity Holbein had absorbed by 1527; Dürer’s portraits of humanists and Holbein’s own Basel portraits, of Erasmus above all; and in England a thin native practice. The curtain, the half length behind a ledge and the attribute in the hand are all inherited. The departure is in degree and in place: a living English statesman given a physical presence and an exactness of surface that English painting had not seen. The stake was real but modest, a foreign painter’s first major English commission. The swerve sharpens a known path and carries it to a new field.

Score: 7.4 / 10

Substitute another form and much goes. The panel knows the man through surfaces, fur, velvet, gold, skin and paper, each a different resistance to light, and it is the agreement of those surfaces that makes the person credible. Oil on a smooth panel, worked in thin glazes, lets the stubble and the pile of the velvet be equally present. The half length behind a ledge sets the man at arm’s length: an audience, not an encounter across a room. The drawing at Windsor knows the face as well and the office not at all, since collar, sleeves and fur are colour and matter. What holds it: the form is not the instrument of a further knowledge, and the content could live in another fine portrait of the type.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Evidence over promise: 499 years, and a reception that grew with the sitter’s fame. The questions it sustains are real. Is the face the humanist’s of Utopia, or the councillor’s who would hunt heretics as Lord Chancellor? Is the stubble plain observation, or a sign of the hair shirt More wore, as some readings hold? What does it mean that the same hand painted Thomas Cromwell, who brought More down, and that the Frick hangs the two across a room from each other? On return the panel yields detail: the links, the seams, the light in the eyes. Held below 8 because most of the debate turns on the man more than on the picture, and the image, once seen, is known.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of northern portraiture of the 1520s and of painting in England. Intrinsic force: the first great work of Holbein’s English career, it set the terms of the Tudor portrait, the sitter’s rank carried by the exact matter of his dress and insignia, the face held without flattery, the ground plain. It is the start of that reorganisation, not its summit; The Ambassadors, the Cromwell and the later court portraits carry it further, and the line to Hilliard, Eworth and the Elizabethan portrait runs through the whole English output. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the image became the image of More, copied repeatedly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the source of the saint’s iconography, a reach wide and largely presence.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 499 years. Form: the image reads as Holbein made it, nothing that carries its meaning known to be lost; its condition record is not detailed here, so wholeness is credited, not certified. Presence: in private hands for most of its life, and so seen by few until the twentieth century, which is charged; on public view in New York since 1935, and its image continuously present through the copies, the history and the saint’s cult. Fame is presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: a panel of its age carries the ordinary history of cleaning and consolidation, charged lightly. The household painting it accompanied is lost, which shows what this panel escaped. Centuries with form whole, at the foot of that row.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Judged as command of oil on panel at near life size, to the anchors of every medium. The making is load-bearing: the picture is its surfaces. The red velvet of the sleeves is among the most celebrated passages of painted cloth in northern art, its nap and its folds given by tone alone. The fur, the gold links of the collar each separately lit, the Tudor rose, the stubble and the fine lines at the eyes are made with an evenness of attention that never shows effort, over a drawing carried to the panel by method. The costs are charged: the hands are placed with less life than the face, the curtain is a flat field of ornament, and the body under the robe is barely constructed. The command is of surface more than of space or air.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the stubble on the jaw and the gold of the collar. One law holds them: everything is seen with the same disinterested exactness, the king’s livery and the unshaven skin given the same truth and the same light. Rank does not alter the handling; the man is not idealised to match his chain, nor the chain dulled to suit the man. The range runs from cloth to metal to skin to paper, from the green of the ground to the red of the sleeves, and nothing in the field contradicts the law. But narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one man at half length before a curtain, and the law, fully kept, governs a small field.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The orders held: consciousness, in the turned and watchful face; the state, in the collar of the king’s service; rank and wealth, in fur and velvet; learning and business, in the paper. They are integrated in one figure, the chain lying on the scholar. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family (the household was another picture, now lost), no labour but the office, no history but what the viewer brings, no natural order, and no sacred order in the panel at all, though its sitter would die for one. A single portrait at half length holds one person and his station. The figure describes the form.

Score: 6.3 / 10