Sir Thomas More and Family

Rowland Lockey after Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Thomas More and his Family (Nostell Priory version, 1592)
Study for a portrait of Thomas More's family, c. 1527, by Hans Holbein the Younger (Kunstmuseum Basel)

Sir Thomas More and Family is a lost painting by Hans Holbein the Younger, painted circa 1527 and known from a number of surviving copies.

The original was destroyed in 1752 in a fire at Schloss Kremsier (Kroměříž Castle), the Moravian residence of Carl von Liechtenstein, archbishop of Olmutz.[1][2]

A study by Holbein for the painting survives in the Kunstmuseum Basel (Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, Kupferstichkabinett Inv. 1662.31). The work is also preserved in a number of sixteenth-century versions by Rowland Lockey, including those in Nostell Priory and the National Portrait Gallery (formerly part of the Lenthall pictures).

Strong calls it "arguably the greatest and most innovative work of his English period" and "the earliest portrait conversation piece in English painting, at least a century ahead of its time" and asserts that "its destruction means we lost the greatest single visual artefact to epitomize the aims and ideals of the early Renaissance in England."[3]

  1. ^ Guy, John (2009). A Daughter's Love: Thomas More and his Dearest Meg. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p.172.
  2. ^ Strong, Roy (1990). Lost Treasures of Britain: Five Centuries of Creation and Destruction. London: Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-83383-2.
  3. ^ Strong, Roy (1990). Lost Treasures of Britain: Five Centuries of Creation and Destruction. London: Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-83383-2.