This portrait, which is one of the finest of Holbein’s works now in the Royal Collection, is a dignified and lifelike representation, full of character, while the details of the rich and elaborate dress, and the sumptuous collar of the Garter, are painted with exquisite truth and care. The face has a peculiar yellow tint, concerning which Woltmann remarks: “It has been taken for granted that the head has been painted over; but such is not the case—on the contrary, it is in a remarkably good state of preservation. The colour must have been a peculiarity of the person portrayed. This may be inferred from its being indicated in a like manner in the drawing at Windsor Castle.”[[709]]
Little is known of the history of the panel. In 1590 it, or a replica of it, was in the possession of Lord Lumley at Lumley Castle, together with the companion panel of Lady Guldeford, and it is described in the inventory as “Of Sir Henry Guilfourd, Coumptroller to K’. H’. 8, drawne by Haunce Holbyn.” It reappears, as noted above, in the seventeenth century in the Earl of Arundel’s Collection, while in the eighteenth more than one reference to it in contemporary literature shows that it was then in Kensington Palace.[[710]] It was engraved in a small circle in Anstis’ Order of the Garter, 1724, in which his age is given as forty; by Vertue in 1726 for Knight’s Life of Erasmus, and again in 1791 by Schiavonetti, after a drawing by S. Harding, and described as “from an original picture by Holbein in the possession of Sir William Burrell”—that is, from the copy, possibly an almost contemporary one,[[711]] which was destroyed in the Knepp Castle fire in January 1904, together with one of Lady Guldeford, and other replicas of well-known Holbein portraits.
Vol. I., Plate 81.
JOHN FISHER
Bishop of Rochester
Drawing in black and coloured chalks
Windsor Castle
UNKNOWN ENGLISH LADY
Drawing in black and coloured chalks
Basel Gallery
Vol. I., Plate 82.
UNKNOWN ENGLISHMAN
Bishop of Rochester
Drawing in black and coloured chalks
Basil Gallery