A portrait drawing of Nicholas Bourbon (c.1503-1549/50) on paper prepared with a pink ground. Bourbon is shown bust length, in profile to the left, holding a pen in his right hand. The drawing is largely in black chalk, with the face and hair worked up in coloured chalks and black ink. An eighteenth-century inscription (a copy of a mid-sixteenth-century original) at the top left of the sheet identifes the sitters as 'Nicholas Bourbonius Poeta'.

The French poet Nicholas Bourbon arrived in London in 1534, where he lodged with Cornelis Hayes, the king's goldsmith and a close contact of Holbein. He had been imprisoned in France for his reforming views, and in England found support from a group of reforming courtiers such as Anne Boleyn and William Butts, both of whom were also portrayed by Holbein. Bourbon's return to France in 1535 gives a short window during which he could have sat for this drawing, which was probably a model for a lost panel painting. A woodcut based on this drawing, or on the subsequent painting, is dated in an inscription 1535 and was included in the Paedagogeion, a group of poems by Bourbon published in 1536.