CECILIA HERON
Drawing in black and coloured chalks
Windsor Castle
Vol. I., Plate 78.
SIR THOMAS MORE
Drawing in black and coloured chalks
Windsor Castle
A portrait of Sir Thomas was in the Orleans Gallery in 1727, and a second was in the possession of Lord Lumley in 1590, and was sold from Lumley Castle in 1785, to Mr. Hay, of Savile Row.[[684]] The latter was probably the one now belonging to Mr. Huth, and is the original from which so many copies have been made.[[685]] The panel on which it is painted measures 29 in. by 23½ in. There are also a variety of portraits scattered about the European museums to which the name of Sir Thomas More has been attached erroneously. The small portrait by Holbein of Sir Henry Wyat, father of Sir Thomas Wyat, in the Louvre, was long regarded as a likeness of More, and is still so described in the official catalogue.[[686]] There is another small panel, in the Brussels Museum (No. 641), to which the names of Holbein and More were attached on the frame-label until quite recently, although both ascriptions are absurd. It represents a bearded man with one hand thrust within the folds of his cloak, and a small book held open with the fingers of the other, and a small dog on the table in front of him. It was recognised as the work of some second-rate French artist more than fifty years ago, and bears not the slightest resemblance to Holbein’s style.[[687]] M. A. J. Wauters suggests that it is the work of Nicolas Denisot (1515-1559), a French poet and painter of modest capacities, who was in England for three years as French tutor to the three daughters of the Protector Somerset. Under his guidance these young ladies wrote Latin elegies to Margaret of Navarre, which were published under his editorship. A portrait of Margaret, dated 1544, is attributed by M. Bouchot to Denisot. More recently this work has been attributed to Corneille de Lyon, and is said to be a portrait of Henry Patenson. There is certainly a slight likeness between it and the head of Patenson in the Basel study for the More Family Group.
LEGEND ABOUT A PORTRAIT OF MORE
A curious legend with regard to a portrait of More which Henry VIII is said to have possessed, was contributed to the Athenæum by Dr. Augustus Jessop.[[688]] He found it among the papers of the Hon. Roger North, in a somewhat elaborate “Register of Pictures” at one time in North’s custody. In giving an account of a portrait of Pope Gregory XIV, which his brother Montague had bought at Marseilles in 1693, he adds: “This picture is judged to be by Pomerantius, painter to Gregory XIV, who was in England tempore Henry VIII, concerning whom the following story is told. The picture of Sir T. More done by Holbein was in Whitehall when the news was brought to Henry VIII that Sir Thomas More was beheaded. And the King fell into a passion upon the news, and running to the picture, tore it down and threw it out of the window. And the picture in the fall broke in three pieces; but Pomerantius, then coming by, took it up, carried it home, and so put it together and mended the colours that it is not to be discovered that it was ever broke.”
However much or however little truth there may be in this story, which was apparently current in the seventeenth century, it is certain, in any case, that “Pomerantius” can have had nothing to do with its rescue. Niccolo Circignano (Il Pomarancio) was born in 1519, and would be a lad of sixteen at the time when More was executed; nor is there any evidence to show that he was ever in England. He appears to have spent the greater part of his life in Rome. The account errs, also, in saying that he was painter to Gregory XIV, for he died in 1590, aged seventy-two, in which year Gregory XIV became Pope. North’s story is very similar to the one told by Baldinucci.[[689]] The latter, who describes the picture as a stupendous portrait, says that Henry kept it in an apartment together with those of some other eminent men. “It happened that on the very day of the ex-chancellor’s death (after the king had reproached her), the wicked Queen Anne Boleyn cast her eyes upon it, and seeing the expressive face of her enemy looking at her as if he were still living—she never forgave his refusal to be present at her wedding—she was seized with a feeling of either horror or remorse, and unable to endure the steady gaze and the reproaches of her own conscience, she threw open the window of the palace, and exclaiming, ‘Oh me! the man seems to be still alive,’ flung the picture into the street: a passer-by picked it up and carried it away, and eventually it found a resting-place in Rome, where in Baldinucci’s time it was still preserved in the Palazzo de’ Crescenzi.”[[690]] If this story has any foundation in fact, it is possible that Circignano may have put the picture in order after it reached Rome; but it can hardly have been the one belonging to Mr. Huth, as Dr. Jessop suggested. Wornum was of opinion that this legendary work might possibly be identified with an unnamed portrait by Holbein mentioned by an earlier Italian writer than Baldinucci, Francesco Scannelli, who, in an account of “an ultramontane painter named Olbeno,”[[691]] after praising the portrait of Morette, then in the gallery of the Duke of Modena, for its exact imitation of nature, says: “A similar excellence is shown in the small portrait by the same master, now at Rome in the possession of Monsignor Campori.” Mr. Wornum also suggested that this small work praised by Scannelli might be identical with the portrait of Sir Henry Wyat in the Louvre, which at the time he was writing (1867) was generally regarded as a portrait of More.
MINIATURE OF SIR THOMAS MORE