Hermann von Wedigh III (died 1560)

When it was painted

In 1532 Holbein came to London for the second time. He was about thirty-five. He had left his wife and young children behind in Basel. The Reformation had swept through that city, church images had been smashed, and orders for altarpieces had all but dried up.

He knew the way. On his first visit, in 1526, he carried a letter of introduction from the scholar Erasmus and found a welcome in the household of Thomas More, whose family he painted. Erasmus wrote to a friend that the arts were freezing in Basel and that the painter was off to England to earn some money. But in 1532 More resigned as Lord Chancellor and stepped away from court.

Holbein found new clients in the German merchants of the Steelyard, the Hanseatic trading base on the Thames. They spoke his language. Over that year and the next he painted them one by one, and they also hired him to paint two large allegories for their guildhall, The Triumph of Riches and The Triumph of Poverty.

Who is this young man? The coat of arms on his ring belongs to the Wedigh family of Cologne. The gold letters say he was twenty-nine in 1532. Putting those clues together, the Met identifies him as probably Hermann von Wedigh III, a member of the London Steelyard.

There is a second Holbein portrait of a Wedigh man, dated a year later, in Berlin. In the eighteenth century both panels were in the Schönborn collection in Vienna. This one later came to the Metropolitan Museum as a bequest of the New York collector Edward S. Harkness.

Look again at the ring. His name appears nowhere in the picture. A coat of arms smaller than a fingernail is what lets us know him, almost five hundred years later.