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According to the inscription on the cloth-covered table, this portrait of a bearded young man was painted in 1536, when the sitter was thirty years old. He holds a letter in his left hand, while a scrap of paper inscribed with a line from Virgil's Aeneid lies nearby. The address on the letter identifies the sitter as Derick Berck, a German merchant who lived and worked at the Steelyard, the London headquarters of the Hanseatic League. Documents show that he was a citizen of Cologne.
Notwithstanding its damaged condition, this painting is consistent stylistically and technically with the artist's other Steelyard portraits of the 1530s.
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