Holbein set Thomas and John Godsalve together on a single oak panel measuring only 35 by 36 centimetres, an unusually cramped format for a double sitting^[1]. Their orientation, close together and angled toward each other, echoes the hierarchical arrangement often used for kneeling donor figures in tomb sculpture and memorial paintings, but Holbein softened that rigid convention through careful characterisation and the positioning of the two heads^[1]. A desk set with an inkwell and pen case is worked into the space between them, giving the composition a spatial device to separate father from son without breaking the sense that they occupy the same small world^[1]. The panel carries an inscription giving Thomas Godsalve's name, his home city of Norwich, and his age of forty-seven, alongside the date 1528^[1].

Thomas Godsalve was a prosperous Norfolk landowner who held the post of registrar of the consistory court at Norwich^[1]. He worked to advance his son John's prospects at court by cultivating Thomas Cromwell, the future king's secretary, and when John was made one of the four clerks to the signet in 1531, Thomas sent Cromwell a gift of swans in gratitude^[1]. The investment paid off over the following decades: John Godsalve was elected MP for Norwich in 1537, knighted in 1547, and appointed Comptroller of the Royal Mint in 1548^[1]. He did not always find the climb easy. By 1540, writing to Cromwell, he described himself as 'half crokid', a phrase that survives among his correspondence from a career built, in large part, on his father's early groundwork^[1].

Holbein used the double portrait sparingly across his career in England, where the great majority of his sitters, whatever their rank, were shown alone^[1]. John Godsalve later sat for Holbein again, around 1532 or 1533, in a separate coloured chalk drawing at Windsor with a bright blue background, most likely a study for a painted portrait that does not survive^[1]. That drawing shows the more elaborate technique, using pen, brush and dense ink hatching on the face, that Holbein developed for his sitters after his return to England in 1532^[1]. John's connections placed him close to the Merchants of the Steelyard, the Hanseatic community that became Holbein's chief patrons at the start of that second English period, though the Godsalve double portrait itself predates that phase of his career^[2].