GEORG PENCZ (C. 1500-1550)
Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536)
Signed and dated 1537RCIN 406202
Pencz was often short of money which is perhaps why he produced copies of portraits of famous sitters. Here Pencz has copied Holbein, who painted several different versions of Erasmus in the early 1530s. This copy, showing Erasmus in his sixties, is dated 1537, the year after Erasmus’s death, when images of the scholar were much in demand.