Focus on this artwork and analyze the Provenance.
In an undated inventory from Cromwell's London home, an unknown writer mentions "2 tables of my master his (vis)namy painted". Little is known of the original after that. 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. Holbein's portrait was most likely destroyed or sold soon after Cromwell's fall; there is no record of it in any later royal inventory.The first mention of copies is in the records of the Countess of Caledon from 1866 when she lent it to National Portrait Exhibition. That version is now in the Frick collection. Art scholar Roy Strong believed that the three extant portraits are copies. They are all in poor condition but the Frick version is the best preserved. 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. The art historian Stephanie Buck agrees with the attribution, although it is highly contentious. Strong counters that as a traitor, Cromwell's personal effects were destroyed soon after his execution.
Roy Strong Cromwell Traitors' Gate