The history of the Darmstadt picture can be traced, with few breaks, from the day it was painted. On the death of Dorothea Meyer about 1549 it passed into the possession of her daughter Anna and the latter’s husband, Nikolaus Irmi, or Irmy (1507-52). Anna Irmi, who married, after Irmi’s death, Wilhelm Hebdenring, and died a widow in 1558, left it to her daughter Rosa or Rosina, who, in 1576, married, as his third wife, Remigius Faesch, burgomaster of Basel. Rosa died about 1606, and shortly afterwards Faesch sold the picture for one hundred golden crowns (_coronatos aureos solares_) to a certain Lucas Iselin. This information is contained in a Latin manuscript in the Basel Library, which was written about the middle of the seventeenth century by a second Remigius Faesch, grandson of the burgomaster. He was a doctor of laws, and a collector of pictures, and his manuscript bears the title, “Humanæ Industriæ Monumenta.” The thirty-fifth folio is concerned with Holbein, and from it the history of the picture may be taken a step farther. Faesch says: “In the year 163-, the above-named painter, Le Blond, bought here of the widow and heirs of Lucas Iselin, of St. Martin’s, a painting on wood, about three Basel ells in size, the height and width being the same; in which were represented the foresaid Burgomaster Jakob Meier, together with his sons on the right side, and on the opposite side his wife with the daughters, all painted from life, kneeling before the altar. I possess copies of a son and a daughter, painted in Belgium from the picture itself by Joh. Ludi. Le Blond paid for the picture 1000 imperials, and sold it afterwards for three times as much to Maria de’ Medici, Queen Dowager of France, mother of King Louis XIII, while she was residing in Belgium, where she died. Whither it afterwards went, is uncertain.” A marginal note, added by Faesch, probably at a later date, further states: “This panel belonged to my grandfather, the Burgomaster Remigius Faesch, from whom Lucas Iselin gained possession of it, ostensibly for the ambassador of the King of France, and paid 100 gold crowns for it about the year 1606.”[501] Lucas Iselin died in 1626, and his heirs appear to have sold the picture some years afterwards to Michel Le Blond, the German engraver, who lived for the greater part of his life in Amsterdam, where he was occupied in providing engraved plates of ornaments for the use of jewellers, and was also a picture collector and dealer. He acted as agent to the Court of Sweden at Amsterdam, and in 1625 he negotiated for the Duke of Buckingham the purchase of a large collection of works of art from Rubens. He was a friend of Sandrart, Holbein’s biographer, and travelled with him in Italy.