The picture was painted in 1537, and remained in the possession of the Dinteville family, together with the greater work by Holbein, for exactly two hundred and fifty years. The identity of the picture with the one in the Beaujon sale was first pointed out by Mr. P. G. Konody (_Burlington Magazine_, vol. xix. No. xcviii., May 1911, p. 106). Félix Chrétien, the painter of it, was a chorister, and afterwards a canon of Auxerre, of which town he was probably a native. He was a protégé of the Bishop’s, and no doubt owed his training in art to him. Several of his pictures, considerably damaged, remain in the immediate district of Auxerre. Although no actual proofs can be produced as to the whereabouts of the picture between 1653 and 1787, Miss Hervey, in the course of her researches into the history of the De Cessac family, discovered sufficient evidence to point to the probability that M. de Cessac took it with him to Milhars when he finally settled there a few years later, and that it remained there until shortly before the Beaujon sale. The Milhars estate descended from heir to heir of the house of Dinteville until 1765, when it was sold by the Marquis de Basville, who then represented the family. He was the intimate friend of Beaujon, who made him his executor, in which capacity he drew up the inventory of all the banker’s pictures and art objects. In this inventory, however, there is no trace of Holbein’s “Ambassadors” to be found, and the inference is that as it was included in the Beaujon sale three months later it was put into that sale by the executor himself. It seems certain, therefore, that from the time when the picture was taken from England by Dinteville in 1533 until it was sent back again by Le Brun more than two hundred and fifty years later it never once left France, but remained as a treasured possession in the family for whose ancestor it was painted.[90] Footnote 90: See Miss Hervey, pt. i. chap. ii. [Sidenote: THE THEORIES OF MR. DICKES]