A portrait drawing of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester (c.1469-1535) on pink prepared paper. He is shown bust length, facing left. The sheet has been folded in half just below the chin, and only the top half has been worked up to any extent.

Inscribed at bottom centre in a sixteenth-century hand in partly illegible Italian: Il Epyscopo de rosester / fo…lato Il Capo lano 1535 (perhaps: The Bishop of Rochester [whose] head was cut [off in] the year 1535).

John Fisher was appointed Bishop of Rochester in 1504. He was a friend and correspondent of Erasmus and a patron of Pietro Torrigiano, the Italian sculptor. Opposed to religious reform, Fisher was a vocal supporter of Katherine of Aragon in her struggle to prevent her divorce from Henry VIII and spoke against the king's move to take control of the Church. By the time Holbein returned to England in 1532, the bishop was in disgrace: he was arrested and imprisoned in March 1533 and executed in 1535.

Although long attributed to Holbein, this drawing is probably by another artist, who echoes Holbein's use of prink prepared paper. The pink priming has been rougly applied in comparison to that on the Holbein sheets. The facial features are more clumsily drawn than on any of Holbein's drawings and the modelling is largely in watercolour or wash rather than chalk. The drawing probably dates from the later sixteenth century when Fisher began to be revered as a Catholic martyr and large numbers of painted and printed portraits were produced to meet a growing demand for his image. A date in the later sixteenth century would also explain a pattern for Fisher's face in the National Portrait Gallery, London (inv. NPG 2821) which is thought to have been used in a late sixteenth-century painter's workshop and which is based on the present drawing.