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Portrait and counter-portrait in Holbein's the family of Sir Thomas More
Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 2005 by David R. Smith
Early in 1527 Hans Holbein painted two portraits of Sir Thomas More, the great English humanist and statesman who had become his host and patron when he moved to London from Basel in the fall of 1526. The first is the half-length portrait of More the courtier and public man in the Frick Collection (Fig. 1), which is a straightforward but rather impersonal likeness, in which his robes of state and the Tudor rose on his gold livery collar tell us as much, or as little, about him as his detached gaze. (1) The other portrait showed him at home with his family and was at once more private and more monumental. Painted in watercolor on linen or canvas, this eight-by-thirteen-foot masterwork perished in a fire in 1752. (2) It survives, however, in three late-sixteenth-century copies, as well as in Holbein's small preparatory drawing (38.9 by 52.4 millimeters) in Basel (Fig. 2), which is my main subject. (3) The two works are complementary in ways hitherto unrecognized, and partly for that reason I mean to call The Family of Sir Thomas More a "counter-portrait."
When Desiderius Erasmus received the drawing as a gift from More after Holbein returned to Basel at the end of 1528, he said it made him feel as if he was there, in More's home, which is no empty compliment in that he knew the household intimately. (4) Eight years earlier, in fact, he had written a famously warm and richly nuanced description of the family in a letter to the German humanist Ulrich von Hutten. In some ways Holbein's picture seems to echo Erasmus's words, as in the details of the monkey scampering up Dame Alice More's skirt on the far right or the viol hanging in the upper left of the curtain in the background. Erasmus specifically mentions More's monkey in telling of his love of animals and says that music was a family passion. Likewise, the presence of his jester, Henry Patensen, standing by the door on the right, confirms Erasmus's assertion that More loved clowns and fools. It is possible, too, that the clutter of books at More's feet reflects Erasmus's reference to his congenital messiness, though this pictorial detail more likely just points to heavy reading in this exceptionally learned household. (5) More generally, though, Holbein has captured something of the letter's tone, its evocation of domestic warmth and informality. The small prayer books in the hands of most of the family members suggest that they have gathered for prayers, but not in the manner of the average stiffly ceremonious family donor portrait of the time. The subject is the gathering, not the praying. On the far left Elizabeth Dauncey, the second daughter, has only just arrived, since she is pulling off her gloves. Next to her, More's foster daughter, Margaret Clement (nee Giggs), chats about a book with his father, Sir John More, while a little farther to the right Anne Cresacre, his ward and future daughter-in-law, passes quickly and unceremoniously behind him. On the other side of the composition, the figures are more settled, but the youngest daughter, Cecily Heron, evinces the same conversational mood with a fleeting glance at her kneeling stepmother. (6) And what is a monkey doing at a prayer service?
Erasmus actually called his letter a "portrait," and it may well have helped to plant the idea of a family portrait in More's mind, since he would have read his friend's description of his household in a collection of Erasmus's letters published in 1519. (7) If this connection has any meaning, however, it reflects a new conception of portraiture, one more closely tied to biography than to the ceremonial conventions that had dominated Renaissance family portraits up to this point. The literary scholar Margaret Mann Phillips, in fact, considers the letter to von Hutten the first real biography in the full modern sense. (8) Certainly, these are the terms in which critics have approached Holbein's portrait. Almost without exception they have interpreted its naturalism and informality as a fairly direct mirror of everyday life in the More household. John Rowlands, for example, speaks of the artist "recording the family when the buzz of talk has just subsided," which implies that Holbein simply set down an actual moment of domestic life as it passed before him. (9) More recently, Stephanie Buck has praised the picture's "intimacy" and tied it to "an important function of portraits in this period, one that photography would assume at a later date, namely to provide those far away with an image of the people they love," in this case" ... enhanced by depicting the person in his or her characteristic surroundings and engaged in everyday activities." (10) For the most part, these qualities have seemed more or less self-explanatory, and calling this portrait the first conversation piece outside Italy has summed up what Holbein seemed to have had in mind.
No doubt the Family Portrait deserves this label, along with its connotations of impending modernity. As an explanation, however, it begs a number of critical questions. For example, Rowlands's much-quoted "buzz of talk" seems tailored to a casually conversational model of the family that began to become a portrait convention only one hundred years later. Where did Holbein get the idea? Helpful as Erasmus's letter may have been for various facts and anecdotes, it could not inspire a new artistic genre by itself, nor does the snapshot analogy implicit in Rowlands's and Buck's remarks carry much weight. It is possible, as many have thought, that Holbein derived the idea from the only previous conversation piece, Andrea Mantegna's Portrait of the Gonzaga Family in the Camera degli Sposi (Fig. 3) of fifty years earlier, which is built around a specific family narrative. (11) But the evidence is decidedly mixed as to whether Holbein ever visited Mantua, and both the narrative and the formal structure in Mantegna's mural are too different from Holbein's picture to account for its distinctive character. (12) By the same token, while the Basel drawing clearly served Erasmus as an intimate reminder of absent friends, this description hardly suited the monumental painted version, which must have hung like a tapestry in a major room of More's palatial manse in Chelsea. By no stretch of the imagination can the Family Portrait be taken for a mere "snatch of life" or an exercise in modern bourgeois realism in the usual sense. It is a highly constructed image, in which ambiguities and contradictions abound.
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