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[beginning of page] 7. History of the Portrait of Sir More.

Winter Exhibition of Old Masters, Royal Academy, 1896, No. 138. Exhibition of Early Portraiture, Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1909, No. 53.

It is said that at one time this portrait was thrown out of the window. This would coincide with the story related by Baldanucci in a book published in the 17th Century, and quoted by Wornum in his work on Holbein, which runs as follows: "Henry VIII possessed one of which there is a curious story in Baldanucci, that I have not come upon elsewhere. This picture, which he terms stupendous, Henry VIII kept in an apartment together with those of other eminent men. It happened that on the very day of the ex-Chancellors death the wicked Anne Boleyn cast her eyes upon it, and seeing the expressive face of her enemy looking at her as if he were still living, she was seized with a feeling of either horror or remorse, and unable to endure the steady gaze and reproches of her own conscience, she threw open the window and flung the picture into the street: a passerby picked it up and carried it away and eventually it found a resting place in Rome, where, in Baldanucci's time, it was still preserved in the Palazzo de Crescenzi:" Francesco Scannelli who wrote a generation earlier than Baldanucci, mentions in an admirable passage concerning Holbein, a small portrait of extraordinary excellence in the possession of Monsignor Campori in Rome. It may be assumed

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