[3] Thomas Cromwell was a lawyer and statesman who began as a blacksmith's son in Putney, and rose to power as an associate of Cardinal Wolsey.

[4] A shrewd politician, he was aware of the effect of propaganda and commissioned Holbein to produce images positioning him as a reformist and royalist, including anti-clerical woodcuts and the title page for Myles Coverdale's English translation of the bible.

The king's efforts to glorify his own status as Supreme Head of the Church culminated in the building of Nonsuch Palace, started in 1538.

He was a significant force in the Tudor court until, hoping to strengthen the political alliance with the Protestant cause in Germany, he erred in advising Henry to marry Anne of Cleves.

This left Holbein in an uncertain position; his guile had allowed him survive the downfalls of More and Anne, but Cromwell's sudden fall badly damaged his reputation.

He had emerged as the "Protestant counterweight to Thomas More in the Privy council",[9] sealed Boleyn's position in bitter circumstance, and became one of the most influential and powerful men in England.

[9] Perhaps because of this, and given the portrait's genesis is steeped in the high and bloody politics of the time, with an unsteady king, we know nothing of Holbein's thoughts on the depiction.

Historian R. B. Merriman described Cromwell as "a short, stoutly built man, with a large face, smooth shaven, with close-cropped hair, and a heavy double chin, with a small and cruel mouth, an extraordinary long upper lip, and a pair of gray eyes set closely together, and moving restlessly under his light eyebrows.

That panel underwent extensive technical analysis in 1952, and was cleaned in 1966; work that "did not substantiate an attribution to Holbein", but rather indicated the hand of a less skilled, workshop member.

[2] In an undated inventory from Cromwell's London home, an unknown writer mentions "2 tables of my master his (vis)namy painted".

Only hours after Cromwell was taken to Traitors' Gate on 1 June 1540, soldiers arrived at his house to remove his belongings to the treasury, a fate that had befallen More some five years earlier.

[3] Historian John Rowlands deduced from the pentimenti (alteration) revealed by X-ray photographs that the Frick version shows the hand of Holbein and is the original.