Sir Brian Tuke

Sir Brian Tuke meets us at the age of fifty-seven, his black cap and fur-lined gown gathered close, a heavy gold chain with a pearl-set cross across his chest and a pair of gloves resting on the crimson ledge beneath his hand. Tuke (c. 1475–1545) organised the posts of Henry VIII’s realm and was appointed treasurer and secretary of the royal household in 1528; he was also admired as an orator and a man of letters, and the folded paper under his hand carries a quotation from the Book of Job — are not my days few? — that gives the whole likeness its undertone of sorrow. Holbein painted him during one of his two English sojourns, on a panel the museum dates either to c. 1527/1528 or to c. 1532/1534, and the picture shows exactly what his contemporaries prized in his work: an unflattering accuracy of feature held inside the calmest possible design, with the gold lettering of the sitter’s name, age and motto worked into the mottled brown and grey of the ground itself. It is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.