The subject of this portrait, the son of the famous Italian navigator and explorer John Cabot, served as cartographer to Henry VIII of England and Ferdinand V of Castile and as pilot major to Emperor Charles V of Spain. Thompson, who came to New York from the Boston area in 1837, probably copied John Gadsby Chapman's replica of the Holbein original, as the latter was apparently destroyed in a fire at the Royal Galleries, Whitehall, England, in 1842.