On this wall, Thomas More faces Thomas Cromwell, his mortal enemy and the man responsible for his execution. Painted five years apart, the two panels—an ill-fated pair—hang face to face, the interval between them charged with a tension that binds them.

Cromwell, who unlike More rose from the working class, ascended to the highest administrative posts in the court of Henry VIII. He supported the Act of Supremacy, which More did not; and as chief architect of the English Reformation, he ruthlessly persecuted those who did not adhere to the new state religion. Like More, Cromwell fell from Henry VIII’s whimsical favor; in 1540, five years after More’s execution, he met with a similar fate.

Holbein painted this portrait on his second visit to England in 1532. Using the common device of a folded letter—inserted here in an exquisite small still life—the artist informs us of Cromwell’s current position as Master of the Jewel House. Far less explicitly, a coronet embroidered in the blue wall covering falls, as if perchance, on Cromwell’s head—possibly a nod to the sitter’s boundless ambition.

The cooler tones and simpler background of the Cromwell portrait, as compared with the earlier one of More, are characteristic of the paintings of Holbein’s second English period. As for the artist’s sympathy for his two subjects, you will have to decide for yourself.