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| Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Brian Tuke oil on wood panel, ca. 1527-1534 National Gallery of Art, Andrew W. Mellon Collection |
Art history has always been one of my favorite subjects, so much so that it was one of the fields I considered going into after high school. Imagine making the discovery a few years down the line of an ancestor whose portrait was not only hanging in a national museum, but was also painted by one of the great masters of European portraiture! This painting is of my 13x great grandfather, Sir Brian Tuke. I descend from him through his daughter Mary (Tuke) Scott, down through the Filmers of East Sutton, Kent and the Clays of Virginia.1
Sir Brian Tuke was one of Henry VIII's secretaries who also was the first Master of the Post and treasurer to the royal household. He was also well known in his day as a scholar and antiquarian, and penned a dedication for an edition of Chaucer. An entry on his life can be found in the Dictionary of National Biography, which gives us much more information about his life. Since a good biographical writeup is already availalbe, this gives me the opportunity to do something a little different here: I'm going to analyze what Holbein's painting directly tells us about him.
First, the Latin inscription at the top: "BRIANVS TVKE, MILES". This tells us we are looking at a picture of "Brian Tuke, Knight". The second half of the inscription tells us "ANo ETATIS SVÆ LVII", that he is in his 57th year of age. The next inscription is French: "DROIT ET AVANT" ("right and forward"), the Tuke family motto. The last bit of text that appears in the painting is on a folded piece of paper lying next to Tuke's hand, one finger slightly directed toward it. It reads: "NVNQVID NON PAVCITAS DIERVM MEORVM FINIETVR BREVIS". This passage serves a threefold purpose: it is a Biblical quote (Job 10:20), establishing Tuke as both a good Christian and humble man (despite the richness of his garb); it establishes him as a learned man who can read the Latin that was the only version of the Bible available in his lifetime; and it serves as a sober meditation on the end of life approaching. The quote translates to "Shall not the fewness of my days be ended shortly?"2
The background is fairly simple, in keeping with most of Holbein's portraits, so we may move on to the representation of the subject. After inscriptions, the most important clues about a sitter come from their clothing. Tuke's manner of dress shows him to be a man of obvious wealth, but not one of excessive taste. The only piece of jewelry he wears is clearly expensive in manufacture but religious in nature, a gold crucifix bearing five black pearls. In his hand are a pair of gloves, a popular symbol of gentility in Tudor portraiture. Though his clothes are crafted from rich materials (note the cloth of gold sleeves, fur collar on what appears to be a black silk gown and single gold button on a black high-necked doublet, which appears to be fur-lined), Tuke eschews the stylistic elaborations that became popular during Henry's reign: bright color, damask, slashed sleeves or a feathered cap in the style of other courtiers, wearing instead solemn black and a cap in the fashion of noted humanist Erasmus, Sir Thomas More (who was a friend of Tuke's) and Sir Thomas Cromwell in their Holbein portraits. While Tudor sumptuary laws did dictate to a large degree what a person was allowed to wear, as a knight Tuke was already elevated to a status that placed him above most of the dress restrictions, save those reserved for the royal family or their closest relatives.
Had there not been the identifying inscription on this painting to tell us who the sitter was, I would conclude that we have here a Tudor era gentleman in his later years, wealthy and very well educated, with a sober, intellectual outlook on life. With the inscription and what biographical information exists on Tuke, we know that this was indeed the case.
1 My 4x great grandmother, Mary Clay (Thaxton) Hale, was a first cousin of at least four and niece to at least one of the Clays who appear in Wikipedia's list. She was born in 1793 in Halifax County, Virginia to Lucy Clay and William Thaxton. Lucy was a great granddaughter of Martha Filmer Green, whose father Henry Filmer of East Sutton, Kent was in turn a great grandson of Mary Tuke Scott, mentioned above.↩
2 On the matter of translations: I have quoted here from the Douay-Rheims translation rather than NIV or King James as it captures the meaning of the Latin more fully.↩
2 On the matter of translations: I have quoted here from the Douay-Rheims translation rather than NIV or King James as it captures the meaning of the Latin more fully.↩
Image courtesy of The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
