Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam

In 1516 Thomas More published Utopia and set its opening in Antwerp, where he meets his friend Pieter Gillis, the city's clerk. The next year Gillis and Erasmus of Rotterdam sat to the Antwerp painter Quinten Metsys for a pair of portraits, a two-part picture they sent to More as a gift. Their letters date it. By 7 October 1517 More was writing to thank them both, and he answered with two short poems in which the painting itself speaks, bringing his absent friends into the room. Erasmus writes in his study among shelves of books, in a pose deliberately borrowed from images of Saint Jerome, the scholar saint whose works he had just edited. The museum identifies the panel actually sent to More as the one in the British Royal Collection, at Hampton Court. This one, of very high quality and in the museum's view by Metsys himself, is a replica painted at the same time. In the royal version the books carry titles, among them Jerome and the New Testament that Erasmus had published the year before. Here their edges are blank.