A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling (Anne Lovell?)

Holbein's portrait of a lady with a squirrel and a starling, painted around 1526-1528 during his first English visit, is now tentatively identified as Anne Lovell. The squirrel in the fur-lined pouch may be a rebbus for the Lovell family, whose name derives from the French word for wolf cub. The 1520s were a decade of transition, marked by the deaths of Raphael and Leonardo, the shock of the Reformation, and the beginnings of Mannerist experimentation.

The luminous blue background and the extraordinarily detailed rendering of the squirrel's fur, the starling's plumage, and the sitter's costume demonstrate Holbein's supreme command of varied surface textures.