The Earl of Radnor’s _Erasmus_ is a masterly and lifelike portrait. It forms a companion picture to the portrait of Peter Ægidius, by Quentin Matsys, also at Longford. For a long time both pictures were thought to be by the latter painter, as in 1517 these two learned men commissioned Matsys to paint a double portrait of them, which was sent as a present to Sir Thomas More. Erasmus is represented in his black doctor’s robes, heavily trimmed with fur, and a black cap. His hands rest upon a book, bearing the inscription, partly in Greek and partly in Latin, “The Herculean labours of Erasmus of Rotterdam.” A curtain is behind his head, and on the left a stone pillar carved with fine Renaissance design. On the right a number of books are placed upon [Illustration: _Gray photo._] [_Longford Castle._ PORTRAIT OF ERASMUS. [_By special permission of the Earl of Radnor._]] a small shelf, and on one of the volumes is the date 1523, and a half-effaced Latin distich, in which Holbein’s name can still be read. The philosopher, turned slightly to the left, is gazing in front of him, deep in thought. Mr. Claude Phillips has admirably described this picture (_Art Journal_, April, 1897). He says: “Holbein has rarely painted with a more exquisite subtlety or a firmer grip of his subject than here. The modelling of the head and hands is perfect in its searching truth and fine balance, showing none of that exaggeration and hardness of facial detail which so often mars the pictorial and obscures the intellectual conceptions in the portraits of Albrecht Dürer. Bodily suffering and advancing age have a little extinguished physical energy, but yet the great scholar of Rotterdam appears here surely but undemonstratively portrayed in his true character. He was the chief representative of the broader humanism in the Reformation, the one man able to look calmly at the world as it was--able to weigh, to judge, but also to show toleration--that is, provided his own comfort and security were not thereby interfered with.” The Louvre example, showing Erasmus writing, in profile, is smaller and richer in colour than the Longford example, and even more searching in its rendering of truth and character. * * * * * The superb portrait of _Georg Gisze_, member of the Hanse League and the London Steelyard, painted in 1532, shortly after Holbein’s return to England, and now in the Berlin Gallery, is finer in its colour and more delicate in the rendering of its details than any other of the Steelyard portraits done by the artist about this time. It is almost Flemish in the minuteness and care of its finish and its clear colour, and seems to have had unusual pains bestowed upon it, perhaps as a kind of show-piece to tempt other sitters.