The probable authorship of this painting has given rise to much discussion and difference of opinion. It has been attributed at different times to Holbein, Janet, Joos van Cleve, and Girolamo da Treviso, and even to Toto or Penni. Dr. Woltmann considered it to be the work of a Frenchman, whereas Mr. Wornum was inclined to attribute it to an Italian hand, possibly Da Treviso. The one thing certain about it is that it is not by Holbein. There is an equal difference of opinion as to the date. The King has so youthful a look, as compared with the Hardwick cartoon and the Munich drawing, that some writers hold that he cannot have been more than thirty-eight—certainly not more than forty—when it was painted. This would make the date about 1529, in which year Holbein was in Switzerland. On the other hand, there are two facts which point to a later date—the arrangement of the hair and beard, and the text on the scroll, which, taken together, make it highly probable that the portrait was painted in 1536. It was on the 8th of May 1535 that Henry, in imitation of Francis I, ordered all about his court to cut their hair short and to grow their beards—“the King commanded all about his court to poll their heads; and to give them example he caused his own head to be polled, and from thenceforth his beard to be knotted and no more shaven.”[234] In the picture both hair and beard are treated in the new fashion. Again, on October 4th of the same year the printing of Coverdale’s English version of the whole Bible, for which Holbein designed the title-page, was finished, and in 1536 Henry ordered a copy of it to be laid in the choir of every church, “for every man that will to look and read therein; and shall discourage no man from reading any part of the Bible, but rather comfort, exhort, and admonish every man to read the same.” To this the text on the scroll which Henry holds in the portrait clearly refers; and further evidence is supplied by the Bible frontispiece, in which the King is shown under a canopy, with a sword in his right hand, and a clasped Bible in his left, which he is handing to his kneeling bishops. One of the little pictures which form the border of the title-page, in which our Saviour is exhorting His disciples to preach the Word throughout the world, has the same text (Mark xvi. 15) inscribed below it. The evidence, therefore, is very strongly in favour of the assumption that the portrait was painted to commemorate Henry’s share in the publication of Coverdale’s English version of the Bible. Against these two arguments in favour of the date 1536, the compilers of the catalogue of the Burlington Fine Arts Club Exhibition point out that the King does not look more than thirty, which would place the portrait at about the date of the meeting with Francis I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520. “The portrait of Eleonora of Spain, wife of Francis I, also at Hampton Court,” they say, “is evidently by the same