Portrait of King Henry VIII, bust-length, in a bejewelled doublet with ermine trim

The present portrait appears to derive from a bust-length portrait pattern of Henry VIII independent of the well-known full-length type derived from Holbein's Whitehall mural of 1537, (two early examples of which are recorded at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and Petworth House, Sussex). Nor does it appear to relate to the full-lengths by Hans Eworth painted in the 1560s, of which versions are recorded at Chatsworth, Derbyshire, and Trinity College, Cambridge. It is somewhat closer to the three-quarter-length type at the Galleria Nazionale, Rome, dated to the 1540s, in which the King is shown wearing the same hat, with a similar blue background, although unlike in the present portrait, he is also shown wearing a heavy bejewelled gold collar and pendant cross.

Dendrochronology has established that the tree from which this panel was made was felled between 1544 and 1560, which implies that the portrait was painted either in the closing years of Henry's reign or, perhaps more likely, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, which, after the Catholic Queen Mary, saw the restoration of a Protestant monarch to the throne.