King Henry VII
Unknown Netherlandish artist · 1505
The first Tudor king looks out from behind a painted ledge, his hands resting on it, one holding a red rose. He wears a black cap and a fur lined robe of deep red, and the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece hangs at his chest. The face is thin, sharp and cautious, the face of a man who won his crown on a battlefield and spent the rest of his life making sure he kept it. It is the earliest painted portrait of an English monarch made from life that the gallery owns.
The picture was painted in fifteen hundred and five, and an inscription on the arched frame records that it was made on the twenty ninth of October by order of Herman Rinck, an agent of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian. It was a marriage portrait: Henry, recently widowed, was being considered as a husband for Maximilian's daughter Margaret of Savoy. Look at how the artist, probably a painter from the Netherlands, has taken care with the hands and the small rose, the emblem of the house of Lancaster, while keeping the expression guarded and businesslike.
The marriage never happened, and Margaret kept the painting. It later passed through several collections before the gallery bought it in eighteen seventy six. The frame with its arch is original, which is rare, and the whole object gives a vivid sense of how European royal families traded likenesses like diplomatic documents. Compare it with the Holbein cartoon of his son nearby, and you can see how the Tudor image was reinvented in a single generation.
Did You Know? The inscription on the frame gives the exact date of painting, the twenty ninth of October fifteen hundred and five, which is almost unheard of for a picture of this age.
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