This version of Erasmus was repeated and copied more than once, with slight modifications, during the lifetime of the sitter as well as after his death. Such versions are to be found at Turin, Vienna, and elsewhere, the best of which is the one in the collection of Mr. Walter Gay, in Paris;[[388]] while there are others, less closely following the original, such as the “Erasmus” at Hampton Court already described, which forms a pendant to the “Frobenius.” There is a fine portrait of Erasmus in Windsor Castle by George Pencz[[389]] of Nuremberg, a pupil of Dürer’s, which is evidently based on the Longford Castle picture, or a good copy of it,[[390]] which bears the artist’s initials and the date 1537, so that it was painted the year after the scholar’s death. It has a plain green background, on which the shadow of the head is cast, and part only of the clasped hands are shown. The dress closely resembles that worn by Erasmus in the Longford Castle picture. This portrait, though it lacks much of the character of the original which inspired it, reproduces many of its small details, including the peculiar patch of darkened skin between the left cheek-bone and the ear, which is to be seen in almost all Holbein’s portraits of him.[[391]] It was bought by the Duke of Hamilton in Nuremberg and presented by him to Charles I in 1652. It was No. 13 in Van der Doort’s Catalogue of that King’s collections. Everything indicates that the original picture of which this is a version was in England in 1537; but as there is no record of any visit paid to this country by Pencz, he must have worked, not from the Longford original, but from one of the variants painted about 1530, after Holbein’s return to Basel from England.
The portrait in the Louvre (Pl. [56])[[392]] is smaller than the Longford Castle picture. Erasmus is shown in profile to the left, about two-thirds the size of life, seated at a table, writing, his eyes cast down on the paper, which he holds in position with his left hand upon a book he is using as a writing-desk. In his right[[393]] is a reed pen. His dress is the same as in Lord Radnor’s picture, and his black cap almost conceals his grey hair. In the background on the left is a damask curtain of dark bluish green, with a pattern of trees and lions in sage green, and powdered with small red and white flowers; and, on the right, some wooden panelling. The inscription on the paper he holds is now quite illegible, but in the study for the picture, in the Basel Gallery, it is still to be plainly read, and shows that the scholar is setting down the title of the work upon which he was engaged at the time he was sitting to Holbein. It runs—
“In Evangelium Marci paraphrasis per
D. Erasmum Roterodamium aucto[rem]
Cunctis mortalibus ins[itum est].”
This is the heading of his paraphrase of the Gospel of St. Mark, upon which he was at work in 1523, and gives the date of the picture. The inscription on the Louvre portrait was undoubtedly the same.
Vol. I., Plate 55.
STUDY FOR THE HANDS OF ERASMUS
Drawing in silver-point and red and black chalk
Louvre, Paris
Vol. I., Plate 56.