81 
Wilham Watson upon the early cultivation of botany in England ; 
and some particulars about John Tradescant, etc., published in 
1773, in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 
Ducarel gives a list of the portraits of the father and son, and of 
the latter’s wife, in the Ashmolean Museum. 
In the National Portrait Gallery, London, is an excellent like- 
ness of the son by an unknown artist, showing a skull at his side. 
Of the three originals in the Ashmolean collection, one is attributed 
to William Dobson (1610-1645), and portrays the subject half 
length in his garden, with his hand resting on a spade; in a second 
he is shown in his “cabinet” at Lambeth, surrounded by beauti- 
fully wrought shells and with his friend the quaker brewer of 
Lambeth, bearing the fictitious name, Zythepsa. This is also 
attributed to Dobson. A third portrait of Tradescant in his fiftieth 
year, accompanied by his wife, in her forty-eight year, is dated 
1656, and must, therefore, be by some other artist, unknown. 
Three other portraits in the same collection are all believed to be 
by Dobson. 
In his Historical and biographical sketches of the progress of 
botany in England, etc., London, 1790, Pultney states that most of 
the known copies of the Musaeum Tradescantianum have been 
plundered of Hollar’s portraits by collectors of prints. The 
volume in the Garden library is one of the few perfect copies. 
The frontispiece of the book is an unsigned engraving of the 
escutcheon of Tradescant’s arms, from the original, also in the 
Ashmolean collection, azure on a blend or, three fleurs-de-lys. 
The facsimiles of the two pages (figs. 8 and 9) illustrate the 
curious custom, not uncommon in the seventeenth century, of 
endeavoring to wrest from the names of great men some laudatory 
and supposedly significant anagram, and of working this anagram 
into a complimentary stanza of verse. If the letters of the name 
would not yield a suitable anagram in Latin, English was tried, or 
vice versa. Thus, from the name of the father we have (fig. 8) 
“Arte notus annis cedas. Natura, instans es: cedo”’ (Renowned 
in art, thou declinest in years. Nature, thou endurest: I pass 
away), followed by a dialog in Latin between Nature and an 
Old Man (Sener), praising the virtues of the learned one. The 
anagram and stanza (fig. 9) based upon the same name, borne 
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