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Hans Holbein the Younger - Lady Margaret (Bacon) Butts, about 1541-1543

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This vertical portrait of an older woman, Lady Margaret Butts, shown from the waist up, seems almost life-like because of the minute details captured. Her head is turned slightly to her right. Her  face is tightly capped by a white trimmed black gabled headpiece which comes to a point above her forehead with lateral points above each ear before each side curves gently downward covering her ears with white trim flaring up slightly at the bottom. A brown finely striped head covering peaks out across her forehead under the top of the black and white headpiece. Her brown eyes look to the right and are capped by sparse light eyebrows above a prominent pointed nose and firmly closed, peach-colored lips. Her medium light face shows evidence of her age in the lines on her forehead, crows’ feet at the sides of her eyes, wrinkles at the corners of her mouth, and double chin as her neck vanishes into her high white ruffled collar.  She wears a black, long sleeved plain dress with white lining visible in the slightly open collar under which the white yoke and collar of her undergarment are seen. There is blackwork embroidery on the collar of her undergarment. A piece of jewelry in the shape of a flower fashioned from many gray and pink petals with a whitish gray center has been pinned to the center of her dress at mid-chest level. A narrow brown fur stole is looped around her neck and falls down both sides over part of her shoulders and arms.  She sits in front of a greenish black background and there is a Latin inscription written in gold above her head.

Hans Holbein the Younger (Augsburg, 1497 or 1498 - 1543, London)

Lady Margaret (Bacon) Butts, about 1541-1543

Oil on panel , 47.2 x 36.9 cm (18 9/16 x 14 1/2 in.)

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Commentary

Hans Holbein the Younger is most famous as the portraitist to the court of Henry VIII. Holbein’s sober yet quietly sensitive images found great favor during the artist’s sojourns in London from 1526 to 1528 and from 1532 until the end of his life. This portrait of Margaret Bacon, Lady Butts, is one of a pair with her husband, Sir William Butts, M.D., also on view in the Dutch room. Holbein first made a drawing of Lady Butts from life (Windsor Castle) and then traced it onto the panel to be worked up to the final work. William Butts (1485–1545) was the personal physician to Henry VIII, who knighted him in 1544.