On April 22, 1909, his Grace told the authorities that he had been offered a sum of £61,000, which he had accepted, subject to the option granted to the National Gallery of purchasing at the same price, and that the purchasers had consented to wait until May 1 for the completion of the transaction. As the Trustees were unable to find so great a sum in so short a time, the Duke sold the picture to Messrs. P. & D. Colnaghi & Co. for £61,000 on the latter date. The purchasers then in turn offered it first of all to the nation, at the enhanced price of £72,000, giving the Trustees a month in which to raise the necessary fund. A determined effort to secure the picture was then made by the chairman, Lord Balcarres, and committee of the National Art-Collections Fund, but in spite of strenuous endeavours, the amount subscribed up to within a few days of the expiration of the time-limit fell far short of the great sum required. Most happily, however, at the last moment a munificent anonymous donor came forward with a gift of £40,000, which, with £10,000 from the Government, and other subscriptions, including one from the vendors, enabled the Fund to complete the purchase, and thus this great picture, undoubtedly the finest portrait Holbein ever painted, for which more than one millionaire collector was prepared to give an even greater price for its possession, was saved for the English nation, and has at last found a permanent home in the National Gallery. [Sidenote: PORTRAIT OF THE DUCHESS AS A CHILD] It is interesting to note that this Duchess of Milan is identical with the little dark-eyed girl wearing a peculiar hood in the well-known picture of the three children of the King of Denmark by Mabuse, in the English Royal Collection, now in Hampton Court. This picture was engraved by Vertue in 1748, and was removed at that date from Kensington Palace to Windsor. It was thought at that time—possibly the mistake was Vertue’s—to represent the three children of Henry VII, Prince Arthur, Prince Henry, and Princess Margaret, though in Henry VIII’s catalogue they were correctly named as the “three children of the Kynge of Denmarke.” The whole matter was cleared up by Sir George Scharf in a paper read before the Society of Antiquaries in 1860, and printed in _Archæologia_.[283] The original picture appears to have been painted in the spring of 1526 at Malines, where Mabuse was then engaged, amid other work, in restoring pictures for the Lady Regent. From a letter from Sir Robert Wingfield to Wolsey, written from that city on the 14th March 1526, we learn that the young Prince of Denmark and his two sisters were then on a visit to their aunt, “which be right goodly and fair children, specially the daughters.”[284] A letter from the Emperor to the Archduke Ferdinand, of about the same date, also mentions this visit. “I am sorry to hear of the death of the Queen of Denmark. Her children are with my aunt in Flanders.”[285] Footnote 283: Vol. xxxix. p. 245.