Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/44

 Bale's picture is a sharp profile, turned to the left, and represents Wyclif preaching or lecturing from a stone pulpit, with his right hand and index finger raised in front of him, and his left hand resting on a closed book. He appears to be about fifty years old; and the sketch is very much what a Tudor draughtsman might have produced from the thumbnail of one of Wyclif's personal disciples. The same woodcut is transferred to A True Copye of a Prolog, possibly the work of Purvey, first printed in 1550.

The painting lodged in the rectory of Wycliffe-on-Tees by Dr. Zouch (d. 1815), and intrusted to the charge of his successors in the benefice, is said to be the work of the Flemish portrait-painter, Antonio Moro, who was employed by Philip and Mary in 1554, and who subsequently settled in Madrid. It is unfortunate that Dr. Zouch did not (apparently) leave behind him any precise information as to the history of this picture. It would have been interesting to know on what evidence he vouched for it as "original," seeing that the subject is not quite what one would have expected from a painter who enjoyed the patronage of two particularly bigoted Catholic monarchs. If this picture is Moro's, one would be disposed to date it before 1554. Whitaker suggests in his History of Richmondshire that Moro may have seen Bale's woodcut; and he observes that the two portraits are sufficiently alike to warrant the suggestion. The likeness cannot be called striking, but it is hard to say whence the painter derived his inspiration if not from the woodcut.