y?r THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM LIBRARY Ja HANS HOLBEIN THE YOUNGER V. HANS HOLBEIN THE YOUNGER BY GERALD S. DAVIES, M.A. AUTHOR OF “FRANS HALS” LONDON GEORGE BELL AND SONS 1903 CHISWICK PRESS : CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON, TH£ J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM LIBRARY INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS HE indulgence with which my monograph on Frans Hals was treated has been a great encouragement to me in attempting the life and work of Hans Holbein the younger, in many respects a far more difficult task. The difficulties, however, are the exact opposite of those which meet the writer in the case of the great Dutchman. In dealing with the work of Hans Holbein the mass of material is very great, though by no means always very trustworthy, nor very valuable. The task becomes one of selection and of omission, and the material which remains unused upon a writer’s hands is greater in quantity than that which he is able to employ. I can, therefore, only ask the forbearance of the reader if some of my con¬ clusions seem to be abruptly or arbitrarily stated. It would have swelled this book to thrice its present size if I had in many cases set out at any length the steps in the reasoning by which the conclusions have been reached. That reasoning has often had to be excluded from a book whose pages are necessarily limited. I have, as the reader will discover, and not, I trust, to his dissatisfac¬ tion, omitted from my pages the mass of gossip which has grown up around the life of Holbein, as it has around the life of many other artists. Where such gossip rests on no evidence, and can claim no historic value, I have seen no advantage in inserting it. The ascertained facts of Holbein’s life are few; it is not impossible that they may be added to in the future, as in the near past, by the discovery of fresh documentary evidence. Meanwhile, and until such discovery takes place, nothing can be gained by the intro¬ duction of tradition, generally childish and often scandalous, which at no time rested on any basis of fact, and which can only be traced back to a date at which all contemporary witnesses had long passed away. The personality of so great an artist as Holbein fascinates the imagination, but a writer has to resist the temptation of building up that personality out of such untrustworthy material. We can realize the artist—though not so V completely as we could wish—through his surviving works. For the man, we must be content to see him in outline only for the present. The compilation of a list of the genuine existing works of Holbein has been a task of the greatest difficulty, in which I cannot hope to have attained to complete success. No painter has suffered so much from false attributions. No painter has suffered more from the injuries which neglect and restoration produce. There is no man whose original work possesses so intimate an individual flavour as that of Holbein. But there is none from whose work that flavour departs so immediately under restoration and repainting. A work originally by Holbein, when once its exquisite surface has been painted over, presents to the eye few distinguishable differences from an ancient copy similarly treated. The work which lies beneath the restorer’s paint may be either one or the other. It is true^ indeed, that a considerable number of portraits which bear the name of Holbein may be accepted, even in their ruin, without a moment’s doubt. It is also true that an even larger number may be rejected with equal assurance. But there remains a third class, concerning which one can only say that they may have once upon a time been by Holbein, but that the evidences of his handiwork have been overlaid and obscured. I have not, as the reader will find, thought it well to cumber these pages with disqui¬ sitions upon the claims of many of these. To have done so would, once again, have swelled this volume to an inordinate size. Those who are familiar with the bibliography of Holbein will easily recognize in these pages the extent to which I am indebted to my pre¬ decessors. For many of the ascertained facts of Holbein’s life, and for the documentary evidence upon which they rest, I have frequently employed the great work of Dr. Woltmann, “Holbein und seine Zeit, though, as the reader will find, I am frequently unable to agree with him in critical questions; and I have also found in the pages of Dr. His a few authenticated facts not mentioned, so far as I know, by other writers. I have, of course, consulted the pages of many other writers, especially those of Mr. R. N. Wornum, but I am not conscious of having employed them in such a manner as to need more special acknowledgement. In critical matters I have used my own judgement, and am very well aware how often it will be found open to challenge. To all who have helped me in my task I tender my most cordial VI thanks To His Majesty King Edward VII., and. to the gentlemen who have allowed their pictures to be reproduced for this volume, the first place is due in my respectful gratitude. But there are many others at home and abroad who in this way or in that have rendered me assistance, and to whom I wish here to record my debt. Without such aid the work which I have attempted would have been impossible. GERALD S. DAVIES. Charterhouse, 1903. Jf VII c^ • •'. V ' 3 ?^. -T"'' ■ ^ -'**^ ■ ,V m ^ ^ ■ • -.■^ ■• -*•. • -■»►».-: .-^Fi “ fiT-^. sirjti. ^^,i;.. :.in>>tf^ .Tf‘vt.»>-^jji# i -.^J ^ . ,'f^- >:** X -^v, . •: 'i* v*;nv;'-fT •■.- 2.1 ^:i #r- 4 ^ ‘-•' ^v. >» 9 ^ w '£. -'^■:X-;iM*dt.'n^^y..' J ■■■ < •% : >> 9 f • •»' ■ i^i^v #«►%. V .-i ^ ‘‘‘'*' • -'x - ’ ’* • i .* » '• • y^'V. „Jc ^■4 ii' '|i »r >* ?•/' . *'\ir » ■ r,* . ,. ;■. •«;>■' :* . ' .L->-' mm^ ftj.|i»rr ., ' J^;3.> ' |.. . • I ■•• «* •■F;J<»i' K'.‘ ' *; . 4 . . • ^. • ' ' ' •■ 1 | ». ri *l’ * ' I »*** -r « .* I >\ yif' . ♦ • .k"- v<^* • - V ■ K ■ ‘" ■ ' ■ 0 ^ fV'<^V - J^’ ;'■- 'X ■ '. • .m. ‘="“ i •**. ^ 'f '*' * *4 . ■ -W CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE List of Illustrations .xi Abbreviated Bibliography .xv 1 . German Painting in the Last Half of the Fif¬ teenth Century . i II. The City of Augsburg.6 III. The Holbeins in Augsburg.13 IV. A Biographical Outline. 29 V. The First Basel Period.33 VI. Wall Paintings ........ 49 VII. PoRTiiAiT of Amerbach—The Dead Christ—The Pas¬ sion Picture, etc..60 VIII. Designs for Glass.68 IX. The Solothurn Madonna—The Darmstadt Madonna 78 X. Some other Pictures.97 XL Portraits of Erasmus.107 XH. The First English Period—1526-1528 . . . .115 XIII. Other Portraits OF the First English Period . . 125 XIV. Second Visit to Basel—1528-1531.133 XV. The Return to England—The Steelyard Period . 139 XVI. “ The Ambassadors ”—The “ Sieur de Morette ” . 151 XVII. Thomas Cromwell and other Portraits from 1534 to 1536.159 XVIH. The King’s Painter (1536). Henry and his Queens. Edward, Prince of Wales.165 XIX. Other Portraits of the Court Days and Last Period 179 XX. Work FOR the Wood-Engraver.185 XXL The Dance of Death ....... 193 XXII. Holbein’s Designs for the Handicrafts . . . 201 XXIH. Conclusion.210 APPENDIX. Approximate Chronological List of the most impor¬ tant Works by Hans Holbein the Younger . . 213 List of the Chief Works of Hans Holbein the Younger in the Public and Private Collections of Europe.215 Index.. . 227 b IX ■ 1C LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Unless it is otherwise stated the pictures here reproduced are by Hans Holbein the younger. The works from other hands are introduced for some special reason. Where no medium is mentioned the original works are in oil upon panel. PAGE ^Erasmus, 1523. Longford Castle. Frontispiece . Christ IN THE Sepulchre, 1521. Basel. On vii Ambros and Hans Holbein. By Hans Holbein the elder. Silver- point. Berlin Print Room. To face i The Basilica of Sta. Maria Maggiore, 1499. By Hans Holbein the elder. Augsburg Gallery 4 The Baptism of St. Paul. By Hans Holbein the elder. Augsburg Gallery Portrait of a young Woman. By Hans Holbein the elder (drawing touched with colour). Munich Print Room The First Step, 1512. By Hans Holbein the elder. Augsburg Gallery St. Elizabeth of Hungary and St. Barbara, 1515. By Hans Holbein the elder. Munich, Pinakotek John Froben, Printer, of Basel. Ascribed to Holbein. Hampton Court Hans of Antwerp the Jeweller (?), 1532. Windsor Castle The Madonna of Constanz, 1514. Basel The Betrayal in the Garden.] On coarse canvas roughly [Basel Pilate washing his Hands. [ seamed;fromtheworkshopof]Basel The Scourging of Christ. J Ambros and Hans Holbein. [Basel Jakob Meier, Burgomaster of Basel, 1516. Basel Dorothea Kannengiesser, wife of Jakob Meier, 1516. Basel Study for Dorothea Kannengiesser. Silver point and red chalk. Basel Portion of the facade of the House of the Dance. Washed drawing. Berlin Print Room Bonifacius Amerbach, 1519 . Basel Christ fixed to the Cross. 1 ^ . TBasel ^ ^ Designs for glass; m Chinese U XtTT 7 rr>TTr-Tx.T^^T^xr I fa & > J Basel ink washed. ^ J [R^sel 12 14 16 22 28 30 33 38 40 42 44 46 46 The Crucifixion. The Scourging of Christ. 54 60 68 70 72 XI PAGE Kaiser Henry and Kunigunde, the Madonna and St. Pantalus. Design for the organ wings of the Minster of Basel. Chinese ink washed. Basel 74 Ecce Homo and Mater Dolorosa. Oil monochrome on panel, touched with colour in parts. Basel 76 The Madonna of Solothurn, 1522. Solothurn Gallery 80 The Madonna of Darmstadt [Meier Madonna], Darmstadt Grand Ducal Gallery 88 Study for Jakob Meier. Black and coloured chalk. Basel 90 Study for Dorothea Kannengiesser. Black and coloured chalk. Basel 92 Study for Anna Meier. Black and coloured chalk. Basel 94 Noli Me Tangere. Ascribed to Holbein. Hampton Court 98 Portrait of a Man. Traditionally that of Holbein by himself. Body colour. Dorothea Offenburg as Venus. Ascribed to Holbein. Erasmus, 1523. Study for the Hands of Erasmus. Silver point. Erasmus. Circular portrait. The More Family. Scheme of the lost picture. Pen and ink drawing. Basel 116 Sir Thomas More, 1527. Mr. Edward Huth 118 Sir Thomas More. Chalk drawing. Windsor Castle 120 Cicely Heron, daughter of Sir T. More. Chalk drawing. Windsor Castle 122 Elizabeth Dancey, daughter of Sir T. More (wrongly called Lady Barkly). Chalk drawing. Windsor Castle 124 Anne Cresacre, daughter-in-law of Sir T. More. Chalk drawing. Windsor Castle 124 William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury. Louvre 126 Study FOR Archbishop Warham. Chalk drawing. Windsor Castle 126 John Fisher. Chalk drawing. Windsor Castle 128 Sir Henry Guildford, Master of the Horse to Henry VIH. Windsor Castle 130 Nicholas Kratzer the Astronomer, 1528. Louvre 132 Elsbeth, wife of Hans Holbein, with two Children. Oil on paper, afterwards laid down on panel. Basel 134 Costume of Basel. One of a set. Pen and ink washed. Basel 136 George Gyze or Gisze, 1533. Berlin 140 Apollo and the Muses. Sketch for a triumphal arch. Washed sepia or brown ink. Berlin Print Room 146 Basel 100 Basel 102 Louvre 108 Louvre no Basel 112 Xll The Ambassadors, 1533. National Gallery, London Derich de Born, 1533. Windsor Castle Charles Solier, Sieur de Morette. Dresden Robert Cheseman of Dormanswell, with a falcon on his wrist. 1533. ^ Mauritshuis, The Hague Thomas Cromwell, afterwards Earl of Essex. Earl of Caledon, Tyttenhanger Lord Cromwell (?). Chalk drawing. Earl of Pembroke, Wilton House Henry VIII. A copy of a lost original by Holbein. Windsor Castle Henry VIII. Chalk drawing. Munich Print Cabinet Henry VIII. and Henry VII. Portion of the Cartoon for the Wall- painting at Whitehall destroyed by fire, 1698. Duke of Devonshire Queen Jane Seymour. Imperial Gallery, Vienna Study for Jane Seymour. Chalk drawing. Windsor Castle Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan. Lent by the Duke of Norfolk to the National Gallery, London. Queen Anne of Cleves, 1539. Body colour on vellum. Louvre Edward, Prince of Wales. Chalk drawing. Windsor Castle Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. Windsor Castle Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Chalk drawing. Windsor Castle Sir Richard Southwell. Chalk drawing. Windsor Castle Lady Parker. Chalk drawing. Windsor Castle Reskymeer, a Cornish Gentleman. Hampton Court Dedication page to Sir Thomas More’s “ Utopia.” Woodcut. British Museum Six Cuts from the Old Testament Illustrations. Woodcuts. Basel Seven Cuts from the Old Testament Illustrations. Woodcuts. Basel Title-page to Coverdale’s Bible. Woodcut. British Museum The Alphabet of Death. Woodcuts. British Museum Imagines Mortis. Known as the Dance of Death. Woodcuts (7 pages). British Museum 196, 198 Cup designed for Hans of Antwerp. Pencil drawing. Basel Cup designed for Queen Jane Seymour. Pen drawing. Not undoubtedly from the hand of Holbein. Two Designs for Daggers. Pen drawings. xiii British Museum British Museum PAGE 152 154 156 158 159 162 165 166 168 170 170 172 174 176 179 180 180 182 184 186 188 188 192 194 200 202 204 206 Design for a Timepiece. The last known drawing by Hans Sir Nicholas Carew, Master of the Horse to Henry VIIL Chalk drawing. Basel 212 John More, son of Sir Thomas More. Chalk drawing. Windsor Castle 214 Queen Anne Boleyn (?). Chalk drawing. Windsor Castle 214 Lady Mary, after Queen (?). Chalk drawing. Windsor Castle 216 Lady Butts, wife of Sir William Butts, King’s Physician. Lady Heveningham (called Henegham). Chalk drawing. Windsor Castle 222 An unknown Man. Chalk and water-colour. Berlin Print Room 224 The Virgin and Child. Design, perhaps for woodcut, on gray Design for a Chimney-piece. Washed drawing. British Museum 224 Six Designs for Jewels. Pen and ink washed. British Museum 226 Six Designs for Jewels. ,, ,, 226 Two Desigi^s for Jewels. ,, ,, 226 Three Designs for Jewels. ,, ,, 226 Two Designs for Book-covers. ,, ,, 226 Two Designs for Book-covers. ,, „ 226 ABBREVIATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF HANS HOLBEIN Amiet, Jacob J. Hans Holbein’s Madonna von Solothurn. Solothurn, 1879 Blanc, Charles. Sub Jean Holbein: Histoire des Peintres. Paris, i860 Chamberlaine. Imitations of Original Drawings by Holbein. Engraved by Barto- Lzzi. London, 1792. Chatto and Jackson. Treatise on Wood Engraving. Henry G. Bohn, London, 1861 Cundall, Joseph. Holbein. Sampson Low, Marston, London, 1879 Dance of Death. First edition, with the preface. Kaspar and Melchior Trechsel, Lyon, 1538 Holbein Society’s reprint of first edition. London, 1869 For an entire literature on this subject, see British Museum Catalogue. Dickes, W. F. Holbein’s Ambassadors. Cassell and Co., 1903 Douce, F., and Dibdin, T. F. The Dance of Death. G. Bell and Sons, London, 1896 Gaedertz, T. Hans Holbein der Jiingere und seine Madonna des Biirgemeister’s Mejer. 8*’. Lubeck, 1872 Goette, A. Holbein Totentanz und seine Vorbilder. 8°. Strassburg, 1897 Hanfstaengl, F. Portraits of Illustrious Personages in the Court of Henry VHI. at Windsor, with Introduction by R. R. Holmes, F.S.A. Hanfstaengl, London, 1895 Hegner, U. Hans Holbein der Jiingere. 4°. Berlin, 1887 Hervey, Mary F. S. Holbein’s Ambassadors. 4°. London, 1900 His, E. Dessins d’Ornaments de Hans Holbein. Facsimile en photogravure. Texte par E. His. Fol. Boussod, Valadon et Cie, Paris, 1886 Historic Portraits of the Court of Henry VHI. 40 reproductions. Arundel Society, London, 1877 Jacobi. Neue Deutung der beiden Nackten Knaben auf Holbein’s Madonna, etc., etc. 8°. Leipzig, 1865 Jansen. Die Aechteit der Holbeinscher Madonna in Dresden. Dresden, 1871 Knackfuss, H. Holbein. Translated by Campbell Dodgson. London, H. Grevel, 1899 Liebenau, T. von. Hans Holbein d. J. Fresken am Hertenstein Hause in Luzern. 8^ 1888 Lippmann, F. Der Todtentanz von Hans Holbein. 1879 Mantz, Paul. Hans Holbein. Dessins et gravures. Fol. Paris, 1879 Passavant, S. D. Peintre Graveur. 6 volumes (Vol. HI.). Leipzig, 1860-64 Patin, C. Introduction to Stultitiae Laus. Figuris Holbeinanis Illustrata. 8°. Basel, 1676 XV Rumohr, C. F. L. F. von. Hans Holbein der Jungere in seinem Verhaltmss zum Deutschen Formschnittwesen. 8°. Leipzig, i8j6 Ruskin. J Ariadne. Florentina. George Allen, London, 1876 Sandrart, J. von. Accademia Todesca. 4 vols. folio. Nuremberg, 1675 Van Mander, Karel. Het Schilder Boek. Haerlem, 4®, 1604, and subsequent editions Waagen, Gustav Friedrich. Treasures of Art in Great Britain. Translated by Lady Eastlake. 4 vols. London, 1854 57 Woltmann, a. F. G. a. Holbein und seine Zeit 8«. 3rd edition. Leipzig, 1876 English translation of do., 2nd edition, by F. E. Bunnett. 8°. London, 1872 Woltmann, A. F. G. A. De J. Holbeinii origine. _ Leipzig WoRNUM, R. N. Some Account of the Life and Works of Hans Holbein the Younger. London, 1867 Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters. Sub Holbein. G. Bell and Sons, London, 1889 Cyclopedia of Painters. Stib Holbein. Charles Scribner, New York, 1886 Dictionary of National Biography. Sub Holbein. Smith, Elder and Co., London, 1891 Encyclopedia Britannica. Sub Holbein. Times Office, London, 1901 ERRATA Page 16, line 18. The name Ambrose should be spelt Arabros. Page 30, line 6. The name Elspeth should be spelt Elsbeth. Page 35, line 23. For “ Madame della Seggiola” read" Madonna.” Page 39, line 15. Fbr “ Bonifacius Amerbach” read " BasiVms Amerbach.” On pages 30 and 143, the name Dirk or Derick should be spelt Derich. Page 87, line 8 from foot. The Dresden copy of the Meier Madonna has not been reproduced here, and the text must be altered accordingly. XVI ADDENDA TO THE LIST OF WORKS BY HOLBEIN. ENGLAND. Mr. Humphry Ward. Sir Anthony Wingfield, K.G. Portrait of an elderly man with white beard: right hand raised holding staff of office, left hand holding glove. Black satin close fitting dress; black velvet cloak trimmed with brown fur. Flat cap, collar of the garter: ring on forefinger of right hand with coat of arms. *In the same ownership is an oil painting probably executed by a follower of Holbein, and bearing the inscription in sixteenth century script “ A. Boloyne. 9.” It is an exact transcript in oil from Holbein’s drawing at Windsor which bears the name of Anne Boleyn (see List of Illustrations). Quicke Collection, Devonshire. *Miniature portrait of Sir Thomas More. In black fur-trimmed robe and flat cap. He is wearing the collar of SS and a Tudor Rose pendant therefrom. HOLLAND, The Queen of Holland’s Collection. *Two very fine miniature portraits of persons unknown. ITALY. Uffizi Gallery. *Three miniature portraits. Pitti Gallery. *One miniature portrait. UNITED STATES. New York Metropolitan Museum. Portrait of a man : supposed to be Cranmer. For full description and information as to these see Williamson’s forthcoming “ History of Portrait Miniatures. ► X'" ’* m HOLBEIN THE YOUNGER CHAPTER J IN THE -tAST HAtP-THE"^ FirTEfeNT^ CHNttRY k <<0LB8|BW'^ ycntftg^>a» bom in tlie city i)f*Aft^> tl|b«chaptcc wiU " .,fcM**r rhe&fsiftlihr. iy assure himatLf >»f tltai feKt be foaod tW oati.n, uf: Schongadec, Michael WoWgcni^, TIans Hoibcfn the ritei Hent^fF(k Strigel. Albrecbt Dorer.lJius Cranach, Maos liatgkmair, Hans li.ddiing Griitt, Hans Hol^a the wonyar, Christtyitet .Agihctifrr, and others. '■RsrttovefifeViii'JjlifiS'’ibcTi^cliicf oaincs, AlteotOi CS^SfCT' Hans Heibcitt the yotnger, .and wa bar^ kh .ta o* fk Ih^ bAM xt artwT.s whose antdiryvmea^ If ^ nut AbACf.-? (heciNuiiic Anfitwy pkttt/c iovet, yeiadways 'doat; izjtsxd the laei^eci of 4iic- etuak^nt. They show, indeed tfs ci.-mpawd with the- U'^fi'aa 3e|u:iijlt»-hlflH ssi^period, limitations which «iQ atw^ ;:««««»« tlMM Arotn behtg f^^pnbtr Tt the sense in which the Italian masicirs jut, fKtjf&u, As w« pass in one of the great European gallenes thnwigit wstw jSiied the works of the early Italian abaters -we orrtyL srwt^ IhMt tbetw a '^ue of swoetnesR and of grace comd'^' yiwed to whiich wdeft of the AlbMitli-icentttry Gcrriita is apt to strike ««% V harsh and s»goUr. The - chemetenstks. hidiecd, of the Cermao yehUdls ue ced i»eetow»»w. The Ktrocg and patient natsro oC Mk* nuK oontt* mi n uta Ati ssim *0 eior ibak ti has put rta hand ■ • fWfSMo ww o t s> o'Weft- ttiaw- Xrr* idM <* CicuS Ik ihc'rhaptw lofck-h•«<<*.«#>ny, We jfiwOhs# Ktaa-iOH bkah oka eoaaKA hm^ 1 r.r .. % ♦’K:^’.’ 1TT• V! ?’-: *iX • T- ■;, ^ ,<•">. *- *■* . - ■ ^''>'- V* * ‘ »**wL 0 . it; - * V.-'’ BA m r ’■ -f^' i}- i*i:‘ V^- . .*■^• ■m,i it T'r .^Tt firy -,,- '>;.-:^'*;'f- ijv^;i^’ •»c- ;i, a '^t ‘ »* ■■ ^ vtr'- 49 ; " ’> • -# , ■. J»i e'^.^v - « “■■. T V-- . V I • * .*5 ■>r «• •w i ;.^ - i' . ... . .rr. ‘b..*. ... 1 'C^4tf*SIUUlL..^'hI »»T^; .. • f.» f.* r;; - Burgkmair painted before the year 1500 which carry that stamp upon them at a time when the pictures painted by the elder Holbein are quite free from it. A little later, indeed, the hand of Burgkmair was to be joined with that of Albrecht Dlirer in many great enterprises, and the names of the two artists come into one’s thoughts at the mention of the splendours of Maximilian’s reign. But that union was the result rather than the cause of the Augsburg painter’s tendencies, and if there had been no Diirer and no Maximilian there would have still been a Burgkmair who was the acknowledged leader of the Renaissance movement within the Augsburg school. His name will occur very often in the pages of this book, and it was to his art more than to that of any man save of his own father, that the eyes of the younger Holbein must have been turned in his early days at Augsburg. Comparative table of a few painters of the early Flemish and German schools, with dates so far as ascertainable. Wilhelm, Meister von Koln Hubert van Eyck Jan van Eyck Roger van der Weyden (Tournai) Hans Memlinc Martin Schon (called Schongauer) Stefan Lochner (Stefan von Kdln) Gheraardt David Hans Holbein the elder Bernhardt Strigel Albrecht Diirer Lucas Cranach the elder (Lucas Muller) Hans Burgkmair Hans Baldung Griin (of Gmund, painted at Nuremberg and Strassburg) Albrecht Altdorfer Bartolomaeus Zeitblom (of Ulm, pupil of Schongauer) Hans Holbein the younger Christopher Amberger (of Augsburg) Bartel Beham Martin Schaffner 1338-1378 1366-1426 1380-1440 1400-1464 1430-1464 1445-1488 1450- 1460-1523 1460- 1524 1461- 1528 1471- 1528 1472- 1553 1473- I 53 I 1475-1545 1480-1538 1485-1518 1497-1543 1500-1561 1502-1540 1508-1541 5 CHAPTER II THE CITY OF AUGSBURG MONG the great cities, not only of the German States, but of Europe itself, few held a more important place than Augsburg in the days when the two Holbeins, father and son, lived within its walls. It had been for over two hundred years a free imperial city—one of those many in Germany which Machiavelli mentions with such admiration—possessing for its citizens and its magistrates during that period all liberties and rights of self-government, save the power of life and death, and even this had been in the year 1447 given to the municipal magistrates. In the year 1483 a still further strength had been added to the imperial free city by the formation of the Swabian league, whose first purpose had been the main¬ tenance of the general peace and the repression of the disorders which sprang mainly from the turbulent robber knights. But the organization of the trained bands of “ Landsknechte ” gave to Augsburg the nucleus of a little army which could be used at any time for the purposes of internal defence and for the maintenance of her liberties. They were a sturdy breed, these citizens of Augsburg, and well able to take care of themselves. Once, indeed, when Frederick III., who was possessed of a full share of the mixed magnificence and impecuniosity which he transmitted so faithfully to his descendants, was on the point of leaving the city without paying his debts, the men of Augsburg put in a rough and ready execution on his goods without the aid of a magistrate’s order, and held up his carriages and horses till he had given satisfaction. Frederick took it in good part, and was soon back in the pleasant city among his sturdy creditors. The situation of the town was one of great advantage, and was in no small degree the cause of its prosperity. It stood on high ground at the point from which the two great merchant routes to Italy diverged, the one to westwards by Ulm, Constanz and Basel to Milan, the other eastwards to Venice, and thence to the Levant. It was the greatest depot, therefore, between Upper Germany and the Venetian States for the rich traffic which every year passed north or south from one to the other. It stood far enough away from the great Franconian forest to be out of reach to some extent, though not entirely, of the robber knights whose strongholds in that district proved so often the curse of Nuremberg. Southwards the great and not too fertile plain of the Lech and the Wertach separated it from the nearest 6 spurs of the Alps, and the very infertility of this plain was not the least of its advantages, since it offered less temptation to the roving adventurer and bred up a sturdy race of peasants who learnt to live in hardness by the sweat of their brow rather than to wait in softness on the bounty of Nature. Through the city itself coursed the swift waters of the Lech by many channels, which turned the mill-wheels, and moved the armourer's sledge¬ hammers, and supplied the fountains, and sweetened the streets, and gener¬ ally ministered to the wealth and pleasure and health of the inhabitants. From a very interesting raised plan of the city which is kept in the Maximilians Museum in Augsburg, I find that in the sixteenth century it had ten gates, most of which are still to be traced together with their uniting walls and ramparts, though some have given way to the march of modern changes. The plateau on which the city is mainly built has its major axis lying north and south. At the northern end stands the Cathedral with its mighty roofs, while at the southern extremity rises the scarcely less important church of St. Ulric with its now abandoned monastery. Between the two, and dividing the city roughly into two halves, runs the broad Maximilians- strasse, which, even to-day, is one of the noblest streets in Europe. The raised model of which I have already spoken shows that at any rate up to a late period in the sixteenth century it hardly bore the broad and spacious aspect which it now presents. For a small row of very diminutive houses, whose purpose can only be guessed at—they have the appearance of shops or roofed stalls—are shown as running down the middle. They disappeared probably at the end of the century, when the great fountains were instklled in their present position. East of the Maximiliansstrasse, parallel with it and on somewhat lower ground, lay the network of streets which contained the houses and the workshops of the craftsmen who were making the name of Augsburg famous throughout Europe. The aspect of the city is essentially that of the sixteenth as surely as that of Nuremberg is of the seventeenth century. Augsburg indeed may be said to have her face set towards the modern life, while Nuremberg looks back towards the mediaeval. The narrower streets, the quaint domestic architecture, the grave and endearing homeliness of the Franconian city have given place at Augsburg to the broader and more spacious views of life which came in with the Renaissance. At Nuremberg one seems to see in each house the home of a burgher merchant: at Augsburg one sees in each house the palace of a merchant prince. There were indeed in that day not a few of the princes of Germany who would have been glad to exchange incomes with the Fuggers, the Welsers, the Peutingers of Augsburg. But since that might not be, they were content with borrowing their money, 7 which, up to the present time, has not in most cases been repaid. The houses of many of these great merchants still look down upon the streets of Augsburg, and though the frescoes which made them gay in the days of Burgkmair and his followers have long since faded and peeled from the house fronts, the fashion has lingered, and modern hands have filled the gaps. The house of the great Fugger family, who rose from the craft of the weaver till they became the bankers, the Medici, of Germany still stands in the Maximiliansstrasse. Conrad Fugger, the founder of the family, had plied the weaver’s shuttle, and a hundred years later Anthony Fugger could afford to tear up and restore to him the bond of a prince. One does not grudge to them their wealth in their Maximiliansstrasse Palace if one happens to have just passed through the street of snow-white little cottages in the Fuggerei colony which has done its work so well for close upon 400 years. Jacob Fugger set on foot that first experiment in the housing of the workman in 1519. “ Frugi sed honestis laborantibus ” is the inscription which stands over the little archway which leads into its spotless streets and tidy little alleys. Other houses there are which recall great princely names, and others which recall the names of those who made Augsburg famous for its arts or its crafts or its merchant ventures. And not least in interest among these is the house wherein tradition has it that Hans Holbein the younger was born. At the time of the younger Holbein’s birth, 1497, there was no branch of handicraft or of applied art in which Augsburg had not achieved a very high degree of excellence, and in some cases the very highest. Of her position in painting I have already had to speak and shall have to speak again. Her craftsmen took even higher rank relatively than her artists. Her armourers, her smiths, her goldsmiths were already on a level with those of Nuremberg, and were, before the sixteenth century should have gone by, destined to surpass them in reputation, if not always in the intrinsic qualities of the art. The armourer family of the Kolmans had migrated from Basel to Augsburg so far back as the year 1377, and from that time forward for nearly two centuries the family never lacked a representative who was fit to fashion the armour of a king. In 1482 Georg Kolman and his more famous son Lorenz were called upon to make a complete set of horse armour for Maximilian, then King of the Holy Roman Empire, and the work proving a masterpiece Lorenz Kolman was in 1490 advanced to the post of Court Armourer. In 1493 he wrought for Maximilian, now become Kaiser, the superb suit of Gothic armour which is to be seen at Vienna, and so satisfied his royal master thereby that the latter not only ordered further suits from him, but was graciously pleased to borrow money of him. It was this same famous Lorenz, who, about 1508, during the boyhood 8 of our Holbein, was called in by Maximilian to confer with him on the devising of fresh examples of his sumptuous taste. And from their united counsels there resulted the first instances of that fluted armour which has ever since been known to collectors as Maximilian armour. We know of other members of the family, Koloman Kolman, and Desiderius Kolman, and there were many other armourers in Augsburg who, without arriving at the fame of the Kolmans, were yet consummate masters of their craft. It was, indeed, at the end of the fifteenth century that Augsburg gradually succeeded to the supremacy in armoury which had hitherto belonged to Nuremberg. And not only was the skill and workmanship of her armourers and of her locksmiths shown in these princely trappings, but in every article of domestic use from the locks of incomparable beauty which adorned the fronts of their bride-chests, to the pancake tongs which hung in the kitchen, the same high standard of craftsmanship and the same loving delight in the labour of their hands is always to be seen.^ The goldsmiths of Augsburg, closely allied with the armourers and also with the engravers, and therefore also with the painters, were no less famous, and they too wrested the supremacy from Nuremberg at about the same date as the armourers. Their work was famous in every province of central Europe, and reached, either by the ordinary methods of commerce, or by the special orders of rich connoisseurs, the houses of the wealthy in in such widely separated directions as the Levant, Russia, England, and Spain. It will be necessary to speak of some of the characteristics of German goldsmiths’ work when we deal in a later portion of this book with Holbein s designs for handicrafts. It will be enough, therefore, at this point to say that whatever technical skill and faultless craftsmanship can accomplish, was present always in the highest degree in the works of the Augsburg goldsmiths. The same high standard of excellence was reached in other branches of handicraft—for example, in leatherwork and in textile fabrics. In a country and at a time when all men rode, and when all went bravely accoutred if they could, the saddler and leather-worker was scarcely less important and scarcely less of an artist than the armourer himself,^ while the art of the weaver, in a city where the merchants’ wives appeared at the pageants in cloth of gold, could claim its position by visible right. Men ‘ The National Museums of Munich and Berlin are rich in the work of the Augsburg smithies. The goldsmiths’ work of the city can be studied in the same museums and in the Ambras collection at Vienna, the Green Vaults at Dresden, and in scattered examples all over Europe. ® At Basel, for example, in the Guild “ Zum Himmel,” the leather-workers were included with the painters and the barbers (barber surgeons, i.e. surgeons), though it must be admitted that the inclusion of the bakers in the same guild somewhat discounts the force of the illustration, while it emphasizes the value set on good work in any department. 9 c needed not in Augsburg to be reminded that Conrad Fugger had once sat at the loom. The stuffs of Augsburg went far and wide throughout the cities of Europe side by side with the treasure boxes which carried the goldsmiths’ cups. But there was one more industry in Augsburg which was destined to be very closely identified with the future life and work of our Hans Holbein. In the year 1468, some fourteen years after Gutenberg and Fust had begun to compose the types of their Great Bible at Mainz, Gunther Zainer of Reutligen arrived at Augsburg, and setting up his printing press in the city became its proto-typographer. A year or two later came Johann Baemler and Johann Schiissler, and in 1472 the abbot of St. Ulric and St. Afra, Melchior de Stanheim, set up a printing press in the cloisters of the monastery which was already famous for its noble manuscript library. Other printers known to us by name are Anthony Sorg, 1475, Johann Keller, 1478, and Hans Schobser, 1483. Later came Johann Schosnsperger, who was destined to print in 1517 the “Teuerdanck” for Maximilian, which Hans Burgkmair, Beck and Schaufelein illustrated. By the time that young Holbein’s eyes were open to all that was around him the printing presses of Augsburg were in full swing. The early printed books of the city are notable for the abundance of their wood- cuts, and their production gave employment to a large number of wood- engravers. Here, however, it must be admitted that the standard of achievement at Augsburg hardly rose to the same level as in the other arts, in the early days, at any rate, of its printing presses. Perhaps the short¬ coming was even felt and admitted, since we find that some of the earliest drawings by Burgkmair for the “Teuerdanck” were not immediately cut, but waited for the importation in 1510 of Jobst de Negker, Denecker, or Dienecker, a master craftsman from Flanders, who soon gathered a school of woodcutters and a band of apprentices around him, amongst whom perhaps was Hans Liitzelberger (who was afterwards to engrave the “Dance of Death ” for Holbein), if the view which some authorities hold be correct, that his birthplace was Augsburg. Be this how it may, it is certain that our painter must have been fully acquainted with all the processes of wood¬ cutting, which he probably saw daily practised by youths of his own standing before he left his native city. It has been important to dwell thus upon the condition of the handi¬ crafts in the city of Holbein’s birth. It may help us to realize the influence of his early surroundings upon a boy of his artistic temperament. Good workmanship was in the air at Augsburg. A man took it in as a child learns its mother tongue, unconsciously and without pedantic rules of grammar. The eighteen first years of life which Holbein spent in Augsburg Avere to be of determining influence on the career of one who was afterwards 10 prepared and equipped to paint anything from the portrait of a king to the house-front of a burgher and the table of a dining-room, and to design anything from the chalice of a queen to the dagger of a courtier and the shoe-buckle of a servingman. We have several times mentioned the Kaiser Maximilian. He is so inseparable from the art life of Germany in his day, and especially from that of his favourite city, Augsburg, that no description of the city in Holbein’s youth would be complete without a glance at one of the most fantastic and in some respects one of the most striking figures of his age. Maximilian was perhaps the strangest of all the products of the Renaissance. We know the appearance of the man from Diirer’s drawing in the Albertina, and from his painting in the Belvedere at Vienna—a kindly, shrewd, and energetic face, but by no means highly intellectual or of commanding power, or of imaginative force. And yet this was the man who was a dreamer of dreams from his youth, a builder of imaginary empires, a winner of imaginary battles, one, too, who was all his life through carried along by visions of conquest in many other fields, literary, artistic, practical, in each single one of which but one man in a century succeeds in reaching pre-eminence where ten millions fail. He was to be architect, author, designer; to be a leader of armies, a master of statecraft, a pillar of the Church. He dreamed—the thing is almost too fantastic to believe if it were not undoubtedly true— that he might share the papal throne with Julius IL, and wield the temporal sword of the Church while Julius held the spiritual. He saw himself always in his visions as a mighty soldier, he wore many and gorgeous suits of armour, and he once won a battle. He believed in himself as a profound and secret diplomatist, but he never knew his own mind for two days together, and his secrecy consisted in never imparting his counsels to those who should have shared them and who might have kept him constant. In his attitude towards the fine arts something of the same character appears. He touched them nearly all, not as a mere patron, but as an amateur in each. He would be an architect, and leaves behind a scheme of which the Chapel at Innsbruck is the outcome. He projects magnificent literary enterprises to illustrate his own life—the “Teuerdanck” and “ Weisskunig.” The former, indeed, got itself finished, and survives by reason of Burgkmair’s drawings and Schcensperger’s printing. The “Weiss¬ kunig” romance, which purports to deal allegorically with the Kaiser’s career, remained unfinished at his death, in spite of honest efforts, because there was no one left, not even the secretary who did the literary portion, who could say what most of it could possibly mean. A touch of romance indeed there was visible in all that the Kaiser Maximilian attempted. “The last of the knights” men called him in his own day, and there was certainly something of the knight errant in his com- position. Every idea, every undertaking of his, had in it something of the magnificent, but always with something of the unpractical. The man him¬ self was a mixture of the magnificent and the commonplace. At Augsburg, where he preferred to live, and had bought himself the house of the Peut- ingers, he loved to combine the homely, gossipy, fussy life of a retired burgher with the occasional magnificence of an emperor. They liked him well there, for the man had little evil in his nature—"was not without ambition, but without the illness should attend it; ” no hero, therefore, to Machiavelli,^—and they kept him in his place. He danced with the burghers’ wives at revels, and he borrowed money of their husbands, and, above all, he gave them every now and then a glorious pageant in which he rode in full armour down Maximiliansstrasse to St. Ulric, with Maria Bianca at his side. But when, having already established himself in the house of the Peutingers, he tried to buy more houses to increase his royal foothold in the city, he was told he could not have them. He took it good-humouredly, and danced, and gossiped, and paraded as before. But it would be very ungrateful, as well as very unhistorical, if we were to underrate his services to and his influences upon art. Probably he loved Art, and was interested in it for its own sake, and to say that he used it as a means to enhance his own magnificence is merely to say what is true to some extent of many another patron of art—of Pisistratus and Pericles, of Lorenzo dei Medici and Leo X. Of the impulse which his splendour-loving nature gave to every form of art in Augsburg and else¬ where there can be no doubt. When he rode through the streets in the armour which Lorenz Kolman had wrought, and which Hans Burgkmair had made portraits of, and with the cloth of gold for his housings which a descendant of the Fuggers had woven, men might know that he had paid for none of the three. But there were others in that train, and out of it, who wore armour also and cloth of gold and loved to have their portraits painted. And when he ordered cups of the Augsburg goldsmiths which it needed two men to hold, that he might send them as gifts to royal neighbours, though the debt might never be struck from the goldsmiths’ books, orders might yet flow back, and did flow back, from the princely recipients. He was, in fact, to reduce the matter to the vulgar dimensions of the modern commercial view, a gorgeous though unconscious advertisement for the arts which he encouraged. It is with reason and with justice that Augsburg has ever since recorded its gratitude to its imperial burgher by giving his name to its noblest street, down which he rode as emperor and strolled as citizen. ' Maximilian is selected by Machiavelli for dissection as one of the standard failures among contemporary rulers. 12 CHAPTER III THE HOLBEINS IN AUGSBURG T he first member of the Holbein family in Augsburg whom we can identify was Michel Holbain,^ who is referred to in one document as a leather-worker, and who is known from the Augsburg register to have lived originally just outside the Kreuzer gate, and later to have moved to that part of the city near to the Maximiliansstrasse, and just below it on the east, which was known as the Diephold, the industrial quarter of the city at that time. It has been thought that the family originally came from Basel, since the name is found in that city at the same date, while another family bearing the same name is known to have lived near Constanz. The fact that one Hans Holbein migrated from his native town of Augsburg, as we shall presently see, to Basel, is appealed to in support of the view that his ancestors had originally come from thence, but there were other inducements of such evident force to lead him to that choice that the argument cannot count for much. Nor is the matter of great importance. We are only able to speak with certainty of three generations of Holbeins in Augsburg : the first generation having for male representative Michel Holbein, the second having Hans Holbein the elder and his brother Sigmund, and the third Ambrose Holbein and our painter Hans Holbein the younger. It must be mentioned, however, that for some time after Passavant’s apparent discovery in 1846, another Hans Holbein, who had to be distinguished as Hans Holbein the grandfather, was interpolated between Michel Holbein and Hans Holbein the elder, thus making four generations instead of three. The reason of this insertion was that on a certain picture signed with the monogram of Hans Holbein there appeared the date of 1459, and it was quite certain that at that date it was impossible that Hans Holbein the elder could have been old enough to paint a picture. The creation, therefore, of another generation was unavoidable if that date was to be accepted. The inscription, however, which read “Hans Holbein. C. A. 1459,” was much suspected by critics of weight, and though it held its ground long enough to lead others to attribute further pictures to this imaginary grandfather, it was ultimately proved to be untrustworthy, and ‘ The Augsburg manner of spelling the name is Holbain. The Basel manner, which I have adhered to, is Holbein or Holben. the date and the grandfather have disappeared together, leaving us in possession of the three generations set forth above. We have already seen that the craft which Michel Holbein practised was by no means the prosaic industry of to-day, but was in fact an artistic handicraft. The step therefore from leather-worker to painter was not so great as it would be in the present day, and in adopting the profession of painter the two sons of Michel Holbein, Hans and Sigmund, were neither rising nor falling in the social scale, but merely applying themselves to another form of artistic production which seemed likely to suit their special predilections. The wife of Michel Holbein was Anna, and the home, after one or two migrations, was, as we have already said, in the Diephold quarter. The house which Hans Holbein the elder, son of Michel, and father of Hans the younger inherited, and in which our painter was born, is still pointed out, and bears, a recording tablet. It is in the Vorderer Lech, No. 496A, a somewhat unfrequented thoroughfare now, but evidently in those days of some importance, as is shown by the fact that Elias HoII, the great architect, chose it for the building of his own house, which, standing a few hundred yards further north, is one of the best specimens of Renaiss¬ ance work in Augsburg. The Vorderer Lech obtains its name from the fact that a narrow channel of the Lech runs clear and green down one side of the street, separating the roadway from the houses on the north side. Access is gained to these houses in most instances by a wooden bridge or gangway which leads the visitor under an archway in the house itself. The house of the Holbeins, one of those little whitewashed buildings with the comfortable red-tiled roofs which are so plentiful in the city, has nothing to distinguish it beyond the tablet aforesaid. You pass under the arch and find on either side the doors (still retaining their ancient hinges) and the open staircase which leads to the separate tenements into which the house is now divided. Ascending the staircase to the right one finds the little room wherein tradition has it that our Hans Holbein was born, the little kitchen over which his mother presided, and the room which is traditionally regarded as the painting room of Hans Holbein the elder. It looks pleasantly out over inclosed gardens and picturesque roofs up towards the statelier buildings that line the Maximiliansstrasse. The house is not luxurious, but may well have been a house of no small comfort in the days when the Holbeins held it. We have no accurate information as to the birth-date of Hans Holbein the elder. The earlier writers placed it about 1450, but, as Woltmann was the first to point out, this is much too early. He assigns it, in preference, to about 1460. But even this date would seem somewhat early, if the earliest known picture by him of 1490 at all represents the beginning of his output. Thirty years of age was a late time of life at which to paint a 14 tfie tUi' •oftd the grandfather have diaappeaevd sesgether, luN'tog ua te posacK-Joti of the three gcoerations set fortii iibUweit We have already seen that the craft which hHckel was by tto taeairs the prosaic kdustry of to-day, but ’wa* i» fi|cl an anistre. handitraft. The step Icather-wosi:*- to painicr m» wt so j,Ttat as it would be in the preseai day, and in adOj>ticK the of painter the two sens of Michel Holbein, Hans and Siginund wt^veilher rrsing nor falling in the sodal scale, hut nicrtly j^tplytog thcoseiv** to another form of artistic prodtution wdiich seemed likely to stnt theiir ^'ortaJ predifedtons. The wife of Michel Holbei*'! 'ivi^ Anna, and thr lMt>«. ciiw one or two migtaiion^, was, as we have already said, In the Dicfdtold tpwfn-1 The Ikousc which H.ins Holbein the elder, son of Miehei, and htthcr 0 Hans the younger inherited, and in which ©itr ps^tei: was born, is »iiU pointed ou^ and heart-a twording ubkt. It is in the Vortkrer tawli. No. *96^, a jdlaewhat unfrequented thorougts'^re now, but evldeiitij :r. those ilays of some impOrladce, as is shown by the fact that Elias HolJ. tbs great architect, chose it for the building of his own house, which, standing a few bnsdred yards further north, is one of the best spedOKns of Reiuust. ance wort in Augsburg, The Vorderer Lech obtaias its name from the feet that a narrow diannei of the Lech runs clear and gtixn down one side of the street, sepiarating the roadway from the hotifnJifi fjolbcins. oacdPti^Tiule wKitewafcbed’boififcngs w 4 th the eomfgtiSIl* twj-uled ro<»fe whic^Fai# vb ptentsfu? w iJw A‘~ !uu notlilftg to cUit^fesh- ft bfvnnd the lrd/14 aifewialif. Vo* p*.w ...vtc ct aidt irtd ^ door* (stJI hsfe»'*jrsg aod the kads tc ^ the boas* -Wjendtcgj »tk ■ lias « fttrk uAic& h^‘ mother 4, ^ p*'atlag r{ »r gaideii it, 'bsafeaP'it- *vi -&* ■' ■■ --■ WAMQW OViUCr/ A TO TlAJnalOI^S'wlief*^-* iiaaj.'? siiT !»i.sajoH au/Jt va first picture. I think, moreover, that his portrait of himself, which he introduced into his picture of “The Basilica of St. Paul,” now in the Augsburg Gallery, shows the face of a man who is somewhat younger than is generally thought. I should prefer, though the point is not material to any question of his art, to believe that he was born about 1465. Of his brother Sigmund it is only necessary to say that he made no mark in Art, and that he left Augsburg for Berne, where he died^ in 1540, leaving his nephew, “ Hans Holbayne,” his heir. Hans Holbein the elder needs lengthier notice. He married a lady who is declared by Stetten to have been a daughter of Thomas Burgkmair the painter, and therefore a sister of the more famous Hans Burgkmair. It would be pleasant to accept this. It would at least form a very interesting page in the history of heredity if we could believe that art had been in Hans Holbein’s family for two generations on both sides of his descent. It would be easy thus to construct a theory that in the person of our painter the gentler, more sensitive artistic temperament of the father had been reinforced by infusion of the robuster blood of the Burgkmairs. But Stetten’s statement has no confirmation so far in documentary evidence; it is possible, indeed, that, though we cannot verify the family of our painter’s mother, we know her face and mien as she lived and walked in Augsburg when her two little sons were not yet in their teens. For in the left-hand panel of the father’s picture at Augsburg, “The Basilica of St Paul,” there is in the lower foreground a group which has always been considered to represent Hans Holbein the elder, with his two boys Ambros and Hans, while the lady on the left is believed to represent the mother. Concerning the identity of the father and the boys there is practically no doubt, but the identity of the lady with the mother of our Hans is less certain. I am, however, quite inclined to accept the tradition. The father stands on the right of the picture. His hair, parted in the middle, is of an auburn tinge and is worn long, the down-falling locks mixing with a reddish beard. The upper lip is shaven. In front of him stand the two boys, Ambros the elder at his left hand, Hans the younger at his right. The father lays his right hand lovingly on the younger boy’s shoulder, while he points to him with his left hand, “guiding his hands wittingly,” for it would seem that even at that early age—the boys can hardly have been more than seven and nine years old respectively—the artist father had seen in which of the two little lads the future promise lay. Across the picture to the left the lady, whom we suppose to be the mother, seems to be approaching the others. She is a fine, well set-up figure, but not remarkable for beauty of face, a blonde with pale hazel eyes and plaited golden locks. Her dress is rich and delightful, and as one looks at the gorgeous brocade of her sleeves ' His will dated from Berne, but he is thought to have died in Rome. 15 and the broad gold-lace hem of her skirt, sewn with pearls, one sees that an artist's wife in Augsburg went bravely in those days. The face, as we have said, is not beautiful. I think that a coloured drawing by the father, which is in the print room at Munich, probably represents her some years earlier, and perhaps before her marriage.^ It is a very charming drawing of a young woman, not of any special beauty beyond that which belongs to every young face which has the sparkle of happy pleasure in the lips and eyes ; the hair is partly covered with a white cap, into which some delicate yellow is touched, and she wears yellow sleeves and bands of the same colour across the white chest front. Allowing for some years’ difference in age, this may well, I think, be the same person as she who appears in the Augsburg picture. But, whether it be the mother of the great painter or no, it is certainly a study which shows Hans Holbein the elder to have been possessed in some degree of those very qualities in which his son afterwards stood supreme. There is something of the same sympathetic power of seeing, and the same completeness of recording what has been seen, without pedantries and without makeshifts, all that gives to any given human face its charm and its interest. It cannot of course be said that this drawing could be safely set against, for instance, one of the studies by the son at Windsor; but set this drawing of Hans Holbein the elder against any other of those of the most careful and most learned masters of his school and day and he will seem as one born out of due time. There is in it some¬ thing of inspiration which neither care nor industry nor strength—and there are certainly artists stronger than he—can give. There is in this drawing the germ and something more than the germ of the spirit of his great son. It was not always so with the work of the father. There are, indeed, many of his drawings which show something of the same spirit in a greater or less degree ; for example, a very charming silver-point of a girl looking down with a smile on her face in the Louvre. But out of the whole mass of his drawings, and they are very numerous, quite first-rate examples are rare and his moments of real inspiration exceptional. We must, however, turn away from this drawing to examine once more the group in his picture at Augsburg. An artist’s portrait of himself is not only always very interesting, it is also nearly always very successful. In this portrait group of himself and his family we may fairly suppose that Hans had put out his whole strength, and we may accept his portrait of himself as giving us the outward aspect of the man. It is not a face which bears the stamp of much strength, either intellectual or physical; it is the face rather of a gentle and sensitive man than of a man of very robust and independent intellect. As we seek to account for why an artist of such ^ There is also a drawing at Dresden in which I am inclined to think I recognize her features. l6 Jy{h//e^yfyaU, Sc . ‘{/uLiAunf ■ Swmi .■ rv-.x.(%•■■*-■: ^ ■ li I J "'Ti i I ■■, ■ ►,>J' •■■'*■ ’ *' ■ ’>■ ' r^ ■-■■;■ '-v.- ViK>«>'><*■ 'i;.-»_.. - ■ -' r* < 5 ‘ •'r*- :'-' *".1 '.^,. ' (/ii^*iri*iH'.vi.,i»f/,i».»t ■ii .-: >• , -•. .'. ,v * ,.ff',.J5&, ^ •■> S!Nr '5 ' - ■<• •■ »‘ 4 r ., ‘H'*- ’v '• '■ " ■ excellence should presently have to feel the pressure of necessity in such a town as Augsburg, we are tempted to wonder, especially while we are look¬ ing at this portrait, whether perhaps he was of those whom nature has endowed with the artistic temperament, but has left out of them the com¬ mercial and the combative spirit which enables them to hold their own in the struggle for existence. As one turns from the face of the father to that of the little son, one sees in a moment that the latter is built in a robuster and sturdier mould; he is a big-headed little fellow, with a strong mouth for a child, and a broad skull. The features and shape of the head correspond with the silver-point drawing of Hans Holbein at the age of fourteen, by the side of his brother Ambros, in the print room at Berlin. In this Augs¬ burg picture he is only six years old (the picture having been painted in 1503), if we accept the date of the boy’s birth as 1497.^ The exact date of his birthday was a matter for debate in former years. When Woltmann published in 1868 the first edition of his monumental work, "Holbein und seine Zeit,” he, after stating the case with great fair¬ ness, gave his consent to the year 1495 as correct, on the evidence of a date which had been brought to light on a picture in the Augsburg Gallery. The history of that transaction is so curious as to need some notice. The picture, whose number is 76 in the gallery, is one of four panels from an altar-piece in the convent of St. Catherine in Augsburg. It represents St. Mary and St. Anne with the Holy Child between them, St. Anne hold¬ ing a book open upon her knees. It will need more special mention pre¬ sently in connection with the influence of the Renaissance upon the work of the father. In the present connection with the birth-date of the son, it need only be stated that, owing to certain differences of style, various critics, among them Waagen, ascribed it to the son rather than to the father, whose name it had hitherto borne. In 1854 the picture was placed in the hands of a restorer, and it was presently announced that an inscrip¬ tion had been discovered on the book which St. Anne holds, to the followino- effect: "Jussu Vener. Pientque Matris Veron. Welser H Holbain set. suas XVII.” The inscription agreed well with the known fact that the series had been painted under commission from Veronica Welser. The statement that the painter was H. Holbain, and that he was seventeen when he painted it, seemed not only to prove Waagen’s contention that it was the work of the younger Holbein, but also to carry with it the proof that 1495 must be the date of his birth, since he was seventeen in 1512. Woltmann, after carefully weighing the evidence, accepted the inscription, and so also did Liibke and others. The opponents, however, were not satisfied, and when in 1870, after the death of an official connected with the ‘ He appears again in the Augsburg Gallery, in the left-hand panel of No. 65, as the child who, with obvious delight, is being allowed to help in the distribution of the fishes. 17 D museum, a closer examination was made possible, it was discovered that the inscription was a recent forgery. It was easily removed by the application of a solvent, and the mutilated original inscription was found upon the open book. At about the same time some other inscriptions and documents which had been called in support of the 1495 date were subjected to a more searching scrutiny, and were also proved to be unauthentic. All direct evidence in favour of that date having now disappeared, the supporters of the 1497 date were left in possession of the field. Their case rested mainly on the evidence of the drawing by the father of the boys Ambros and Hans, which carries on it numbers which have been deciphered as 15 ii for the date of the drawing and fourteen as the age of Hans. Furthermore, there is in existence an engraving by Vorsterman of a portrait of Holbein giving his age as forty-five in 1543, and a similar date and age on an etching by Wenceslaus Hollar. Woltmann, whose previous summing-up had been of the fairest description, thereupon abandoned his previous position, accepting the date of 1497 as the birth-year of Holbein, in which view he has been generally followed by subsequent authorities. Having now placed upon the scene the four chief members of the Holbein family in Augsburg, namely, Hans Holbein the elder, his wife, the mother of our painter, Ambros and Hans the younger, we may turn aside to take a brief glance at the work of the father, whose influence was to be so great in shaping the future of the son, merely premising that it is no part of the scope of this book to give a detailed or analyzed account of the works of Hans Holbein the elder, but merely to deal with them so far as they bear upon that influence. The activity of Hans Holbein the elder as an artist seems to range approximately between 1494 and 1516, for, though his life did not end till 1524, we are not able to trace any authentic work by him after the latter year. In the Augsburg Gallery we have twenty-one works under his name, thoughfourof them are catalogued asWerkstattbilder—School works. Four more are in the Cathedral. In the Old Pinakotek at Munich are nineteen, and other specimens are at Ulm, Nuremberg, and elsewhere. They consist almost entirely of altar-pieces, and the subjects are as a rule composed of three or more panels. It is from a study of these that we can get a connected view of the art of the painter. The impression left upon the mind as we pass from picture to picture in the various galleries where they are now hung is that he was an unequal painter—not merely showing inequality of inspiration, capacity, execution as between picture and picture, but showing often these same inequalities within the framework of one single panel. The upper portions of his pictures, which deal with the more spiritual visions, are often finely conceived, and have about them a certain simple sweetness and sincerity which remind 18 one of the work of Schongauer, whose influence he certainly shows. It has been supposed, as has been already said, that he obtained his early training in the studio of Schongauer at Kolmar. All that we are able to say on this point, in the absence of any evidence, is that it is not improbable. At the same time, since the influence is mainly apparent in the general type of his madonnas and saints, in the manner of their pose, in the lines and fall of their drapery, and also in the somewhat attenuated cast of the limbs beneath that drapery, rather than in any special peculiarity of handling or of colour, it is evident that the influence may have come to Hans Holbein the father merely from his familiarity with the engravings of Schongauer, which were then widely spread throughout Germany. The point is interesting, but not vital, and is not to be determined. It is of more importance to assure ourselves that the influence, by whatever means imparted, did pass from Schongauer to Hans Holbein the elder. And just as the Kolmar master is thoroughly German both in his virtues and in his defects, so too is the Augsburg master. The keynote of his work is earnestness and thorough¬ ness. He is even too much in earnest, concentrating himself so entirely on each detail and each incident of his crowded subjects, that he loses sight of the artistic unity of the whole—unable, as has happened to many another painter in every age, to see the tree for its leaves. The German primitive, of whom Hans of Augsburg stands in his early days as one of the most admirable types, was at once spiritual and material, fettered and unrestrained, exuberantly imaginative and formally realistic. That very excess of sweetness which we so often see in these Madonnas of theirs, driven to the verge of insipidity, or even beyond that point, to the verge of affectation, was, paradoxical as it may seem at first sight, an outcome of this very spirit of thoroughness and realism. The painter conceives a vision which shall be all sweetness, all purity, all modesty. He will realize each of these qualities to the utmost, therefore, even at the expense of everything else, even though, as the result shows, he ends by losing some of them through their very exaggeration. And so the gentle smile on the Virgin’s face is at times driven to something very like a simper, and the downcast modesty of the eyes is carried to the negation of all those other expressions of overflowing womanly tenderness and love, which, never forgotten even by the weakest of the Italian primitives, creates, even in the apparently least real of their conceptions of the Madonna and her Child, a reality that goes home to human sympathies. And if this is so in the school of which the elder Hans is an exponent, still more so is it apparent when he attempts—generally in the lower parts of his pictures, the upper portions being reserved for the Madonna and saints—the representation of purely human scenes, involving movement and action, miracles, processions, martyrdoms. Here commonly to him, as to others of his school, action 19 means violent action, angular, distorted. Some of these scenes, indeed, represent deeds of violence, such as the execution of a saint or scenes from Our Lord’s Passion. This was a brutal scene, says the painter, and he sets himself to realize it in its brutality, by violent and distorted gestures, and by ugliness made visible on the faces and in the forms of the chief actors in the scene. He pursues his end with intensity of purpose, and lets his imagination go as far as it will in search of the sorry sights that the human passions make of men when once they are let loose. He had seen some ugly examples at times in Augsburg and in Nuremberg, no doubt. These are his teachers for this kind, but he will better their instruction. And the result is an exaggeration which fails to impress us because it has gone beyond reality into grotesquerie, and into an ugliness which at once draws our mind away from the moral ugliness of the scene, which is what he intended to convey, to the mere artistic ugliness of ill-drawn limbs and unanatomical action. These characteristic defects are apparent in varying degrees as we pass from picture to picture by Hans Holbein the father. They largely outweigh the excellences of some of his works (notably in the Passion picture, Augs¬ burg Gallery 6i, painted in 1499 for a sister of St. Catherine’s Convent); they are strangely alternated with his excellences in the various panels, sixteen in number, from the high altar in the monastery of Kaisheim, Nos. 193-208, Old Pinakotek, Munich, and they are so far outweighed by his excellences in the four panels at Augsburg, Nos. 74-77, of which our plate reproduces one example, that we forget them almost entirely, to remember them once more and to forgive them in the beautiful Martyrdom of St. Sebastian series, 209-10-11 in the Old Pinakotek. I have dwelt thus carefully, and I fear distressingly, on catalogue numbers and galleries, as a careful study of these works in those galleries will alone make it possible to appreciate the painter both in his limitations and his excellences. As has already been said, the least desirable of his works is a subject in three panels at Augsburg painted for Walburg Foter, a nun of St. Cathe¬ rine’s, who desired it as a pious memorial of herself and her two sisters. So far below his usual standard is it that Woltmann has been led to suggest that its inferiority is due to the extremely low price—26 gulden—which he was to receive for it. No doubt it was impossible for an artist to put into a picture of such size the finished and elaborate work which he would have given for a more liberal recompense. But the form which its inferiority takes is not merely that of rapid and slight execution. A very slight and even very hasty sketch by a great artist, such as might have been in pro¬ portion to the poor sum offered, might yet have been, so far as it went, a very desirable work of art. A great painter who is to execute a commission at a very low rate may justly give in return something which does not go 20 far beyond a sketch. But the sketch may yet be something which so far as it goes is masterly and delightful. He does not keep two kinds of drawing, two classes of inspiration, two types of conception, one of which he lets loose upon his cheaper commissions. And Hans Holbein the elder shows in this St. Catherine’s set of panels, besides the rudeness of their execution, a poverty of conception and of design, which cannot be wholly accounted for by the excuse that he was giving back a value in proportion to his receipts. Moreover, in one or two of his other works, where no such reason can be urged, he is hardly more happy. For example, in the Kaisheim series of sixteen panels at Munich already alluded to, several of the subjects are so handled that Woltmann does not hesitate to use about them such epithets as “tasteless and distorted,” “ horrid and repellent.” But while he freely admits this, he proceeds naively to rebuke the spectator who shall on that account see reason to disparage Hans the elder, and bids him rather see in it all an evidence of the greatness of Hans the younger, who could rise superior to all these influences. This quaint vicarious praise, though it is quite beyond cavil so far as Hans the younger is concerned, can hardly silence our criticism upon the elder painter. His best works at Augsburg are the three panels of “The Basilica of St. Paul,” of which the left-hand panel contains the groupinour reproduction; “ The Basilica of Sta. Maria” ; and the set of four panels of which we have had to speak in dealing with the forged date on the book which St. Anne holds in one of them. This latter set was painted in 1412, also for the cloister of St. Catherine, and it marks so striking an advance upon any previous picture by him as to amount to a complete change of style, so that one can feel no surprise that the pictures should—all questions of date and chronology being set aside—have been accepted for some years as an early work by his son. The handling is everywhere broader and more simplified; the colours not so harsh, less broken up by contrasts, seen more as one harmonious whole and less as a series of isolated patches. The forms are fuller and less attenuated, and the draperies cast in more massive folds. I say nothing at this point of the architectural setting, with its gilded Renaissance ornament of sphinxes and scrolls. But, merely looking at the feeling and spirit of the picture, one would be tempted to say that Hans the elder must have been to Italy since the years that had passed between his last picture and this, if it were not that his known impecuniosity makes such a supposition wholly improbable. The name of Hans Holbein the younger has long been with¬ drawn from the pictures, but it is very likely that both the sons, who were now sixteen and fifteen respectively, may have been allowed to help under their father s eye in the accessories of these four pictures, as also a year or two later in the St. Sebastian triptych of 1515 at Munich. That picture, the last that was painted before the break-up of the 21 family home at Augsburg, was in like manner for many years attributed to the son, though it has now been for some time restored to the older painter. It is, as we have already suggested, highly probable that the son may have had some share in its production, being now eighteen years old, and, as his work a year or two later at Basel shows us, already a competent craftsman. The St. Sebastian series consist of a large square-shaped central panel and two wings, the latter painted on both sides, so that there are five subjects in all. The central subject is the death of St. Sebastian, and in it once more we see the broader handling, larger drawing, and more comprehensive vision which we have just been noticing. It is as if the painter had suddenly undergone some awakening which had given him full possession of his true artistic nature. The scales seem to have dropped from his eyes. There are still, it is true, tokens that it is the same old Hans. The figure of the crossbowman who, at a yard’s distance, and with the contortion which Hans thinks necessary to the action, is screwing up his eyes and taking a most careful aim at the saint’s body, comes dangerously near to caricature. On the other hand, the archer on the right, seen in back view, is a figure with some grace of poise and ease of drawing. It is, however, in the side panels that we get once more a glimpse of the peculiar realistic spirit which we shall presently find repeated in the son’s early work at Basel. The panels represent St. Barbara, who as the patroness of merchants was in high favour at Augsburg, and St. Elizabeth of Hungary. The figures are graceful and dignified, and designed with great sense of beauty. The rich brocades of the dresses, the crowns upon the heads of the saints, and indeed all the details of the pictures, are carried out with loving perfection and with a rich and harmonious result. The draperies, though not wholly understood in all parts, for example in the lower folds of St. Elizabeth’s dress, are cast in that broader and more dignified set of lines which has now in Hans Holbein the elder’s work replaced the minuter and more conventional gracefulness of Schongauer’s models. These two panels reach a point of beauty and of achievement far beyond that which appears in any other work by this painter. But it is in one of these, the St. Elizabeth, that there starts up in a strange and almost repulsive form one of those bits of extreme realism which was as yet inseparable from the school. St. Elizabeth is pouring water from an ewer in symbol of the deeds of mercy that flowed from her to the sick and to the miserable. At her knees on either side are three of these stricken creatures, one of whom is holding the little vessel into which the water flows. And Virchow, examining the sores, was able to decide the exact type and stage of the leprosy from which the man is suffering, studied in all accuracy from one of the leper hospitals which Augsburg, like most other cities of the day, possessed. It is not 22 H I.--f. ~-‘r' ■ - .*■ w 4 -■ V m •■>i‘ I 'i: -Sji ■.e -- - ' i^T ■^i »- • !Sl f-’i ••! h' •k-^TT- ' I U ‘5; i ' i»-' :•* I — • < >i Sr n « / 'P 5 S^ ■Jil 5^1 V ' • l' •’ ’il.. k^ V- *>«■- .*-. « » 'V^^VtiSu yi* -111. \ K J t :ei' •si- 4 Ll r u-^- ‘ • .* *-‘1 '*•^1.^ V.' M • •• .r:wi .' ij '-'- r-**'* - CJ'^ C# '4''- " ' li^ ^k»VI W' • i ¥<■ • ^. Vjwa .11 V. ■ ' mT >- .*v:*i| '..N V. tr'4 .♦Htf*' »i-r’iwrt 1^' •*ri‘ pfV ' ■ < '.• tt-r ,t •^.' * . t. ;r"ii lrA-;:t 'IM .• • . ^ ■ ■ • ■ _• • '■‘/.(v .*<.*^^.^V^M. 1" *»i ‘“’"s’* . V »ii /, tc'' - . Airt*iiV*Cj P t ; Ml . . V jJ ■ ' ' •» V. yr'Z ■'i . V 7’2:*^ . V . « •." r>W-. < V''..~-«* '■' ^ i . 4 I * • *• * . ;! "*' '*•1 S'* 1, ■f. A possible to turn aside at this point and discuss the question how far this is wise or right in Art, how far the constant presentation to the eyes of pain and loathsomeness—for a picture is as much a constant presentation as the actual visible exposure of the pain or disease in a human being—produces the highest form of pity, and how far it may even produce indifference and hardness. It is not of advantage to discuss just now the bearings of the question either upon morals or upon art. But it is of great advantage to see exactly what attitude Hans Holbein the elder, and with him most of the early German school, adopted in such points. The deeds of St. Elizabeth, says he, were beautiful exactly in proportion as the diseases which she relieved were loathsome and repugnant. Therefore, that you may see her in her full beauty, I shall paint her as beautiful as I can make her—and he does—and the human suffering which she relieved as real as I can paint it. He has a story to tell. He will tell it beautifully if he can, but clearly at all cost. And reticence may mean loss of clearness. Therefore all must be given, even as he had learnt it in the leper-houses of Augsburg. That was evidently still his position when he painted his last great picture in 1515. Before the year was over the Holbeins had left the home in the Vorderer Lech, and Augsburg was to know them no more. Up to the present I have purposely deferred mention of one branch of his art in which Hans Holbein the elder was not only relatively strongest, but was intrinsically strong, namely portraiture. That this was really his natural bent, and that herein, if fate and circumstance had been favourable, there should have lain his true career, becomes evident to anyone who has examined his pictures at all carefully, and still more to anyone who is acquainted with the series of sketch-book pencillings which are scattered in large numbers among the various cabinets and print rooms of Europe. And it is therefore remarkable that of independent portraiture so very few examples are known from his hand. Of portraits as accessory to and complementary of his large religious pictures—portraits of donors and donor s children, portraits inserted among the actors of his religious scenes—there are very many, and they are generally the most forcible part of his picture, the portion of the work in which the artist was evidently most whole-hearted. But a detached portrait for portrait’s sake, such as came in plenty from the hands of Lucas Cranach or Hans Baldung Griin, Bernhardt Strigel or Hans Burgkmair, is almost unknown from his hand. There was no man among all these who was so well equipped as he by natural taste and habits of observa¬ tion to have given a characteristic and living portrait. And I can only account for this gift of his having been allowed so little opportunity of unfolding itself on the supposition, which I believe to be correct, that Hans Holbein the elder was a painter who never in his lifetime enjoyed real popularity in his native town. He never seems to have made his way into the circle of rich 23 patrons as Hans Burgkmair and Schaufelein did. Court commissions from Maximilian never came his way, though unhappily the representatives of quite another court, the bailiff’s court> too often did. Examine the catalogues of the Munich and Augsburg and Frankfurt Museums, and we shall find that his pictures were commissioned chiefly by monasteries or by religious bodies who paid low, sometimes very low prices. In one instance where the commission is apparently more lucrative, the Kaisheim altar-piece, we find he shared it with the master joiner and the sculptor, the painter by the way being mentioned third in the document. The highest price mentioned as having been paid to him is, I believe, 350 gulden, and for the large triple panel (Augsburg Gallery, 65, 66, 67), which Ulrich Walter caused him to paint to the glory of God and the memory of his two daughters, he received under 55 gulden. This latter picture is specially remarkable for its portraits of the sons and daughters of the donor. In some cases money was held back from the sums due to the artist wherewith to satisfy his debtor’s claims. All this seems to point to the conclusion that the painter, perhaps a retiring self-contained man, as I have suggested while we stood looking at his portrait, living in his art and for his art, and lacking the temperament which fits some men to live in two worlds at once, had somehow stood outside of the social influences which brought other men within reach of the golden shower that descended from Maximilian and his court. In no other way can I account for it that a portrait painter of such capacity should have been allowed to employ his talent chiefly on his own sketch books. Indeed Fortune hardly can be said in this or in other respects to have taken him by the hand. His forte lay in portraiture: it almost certainly lay also in small, concentrated refined work.^ He was called upon to accept commissions for large religious compositions which needed broader hand¬ ling, better sense of composition, and more unity of effect than it was quite in him to give. The sketch books of which we have spoken, or the scattered sheets which once formed his sketch books, are to be found dispersed among the various print rooms of the great European galleries. The drawings, which are mostly in silver-point, number over one hundred, and probably merely represent the few that survived, while the large majority have perished. They have been attributed and re-attributed many times and by different authorities —for example, a considerable number in the Albertina which bore the name of Holbein the younger have been transferred en bloc to the father. We have, indeed, in these drawings to deal with three Holbeins, namely, the father and the two sons. And it is obvious that drawings in one and ^ I should appeal in evidence of this to the little picture in the Germanic Museum at Nurem- representing the Madonna and Child crowned by angels. 24 the same medium stretching over the whole of the artistic life of the father, and embracing also the boyish work of the two sons, give rise to no small confusion. The work of the boys naturally is shaped on the style of the father; the style of the father himself underwent changes. There is rarely any dating to help us, and it is only here and there, where the name of the person represented is given to us, that we obtain evidence that it could only have been the work of the father. For example, a drawing in the Louvre bears on it the name of Alt Ulric Scwarz, This would seem to be the old Ulric Schwartz, the great burgomaster of Augsburg, who paid the penalty for his despotism on the scaffold in 1478. This, then, can only be the work of the father. But in many instances there is no such clue to be had. An endeavour to separate them through their visible differences of style breaks down for the reasons given above. The rough and ready system which seems to have most commended itself to those who have undertaken the task is to assign the best and the broadest in handling to Holbein the younger, the harshest and most wiry to Sigmund Holbein, and the others to Holbein the elder. The method is, however, full of pitfalls. If indeed the whole collection could be assembled from all the various depositories, and placed for a few months under the scrutiny of a competent authority, it is possible that some trustworthy standard by which the drawings could be assigned might result. At present all that can be said is that it is agreed that the greater number of these sketch-book drawings are by the father, and at least we are able to assign to him with certainty a sufficient number to enable us to say that, though his drawings have never the breadth and completeness of vision which afterwards belonged to the son, yet they are the work of a man who had a keen perception of character and a ready eye to seize the lines of a face which express personality. Under what circumstances or with what intention they were done is not quite certain—probably for his own pleasure and through mere artistic impulse, since in very few cases can any of the portraits be identified with those which appear in his finished pictures. Most interesting are they in the personalities which they bring before us, and which recall to us the men who walked the streets of Augsburg in that day. Jacob Fugger the rich, the same who in 1519 built the colony, the Fuggerei, for working men —-frugi sed honesfis laborantibtts —which is still one of the most interesting and picturesque spots in Augsburg ; Hans Schwartz, the sculptor in wood; Burckhardt Engelburg, the architect who built the choir of SS. Ulric and Afra; Kunst von Rosen, Maximilian’s rough and ready henchman; and Maximilian himself, not in his cloth of gold, but as he rode through the streets on his saddle-horse, with his travelling hood over his head—“the burgomaster of Augsburg,” as his enemies scornfully called him; with many another whose identity we can¬ not even guess at. 25 E Most numerous, perhaps, are the studies of the monks of SS. Ulric and Afra. The monastery lay at ten minutes’ distance south of the house of the Holbeins, at the south end of the Maximiliansstrasse. At the back of the church you will find what was once the great cloister of the monastery now become the barracks of a cavalry regiment, while the pleasant walled garden which the raised plan of Augsburg shows us to have been joined to the monastery by a covered bridge across the road, holds the stables of the troop horses. It was here that Abbot Melchior de Stanheim had set up his printing press in 1472. It was here that men of letters, humanists, scientists, artists came for the sake of the splendid library which Maximilian enriched with many a gift. And it was here that Hans Holbein the elder, and doubt¬ less his sons with him, found their models amongst the abbots, the monks, and the lay-brothers. Possibly, too, it was here that young Hans got his stock of Latin from some one of the monks. Be that as it may, the place so links itself with the life of the boy at Augsburg that there are few spots now left in the town where one seems to be able to see him so plainly. Here by the side of the printing presses he must have often seen the first results taken from the wood-blocks which the apprentices brought in for the adornment of the pages of the monastery books. Here he must have come to understand what was needed of the draughtsman who should design a successful block, and here he must have had his young wits quickened by contact with men of all kinds who lived by the use of their brains and the skill of their hands. Fortune was not too kind to Hans Holbein the elder, but she made up in some sort to his son by giving him some of the most favourable surroundings that an artist and a craftsman could have asked for his training ground. I have already taken exception to a view which is commonly expressed, especially by German writers, to the effect that Hans Holbein the elder was an artist who had early become imbued with the Renaissance spirit and who had kept himself fully in touch with the movement. I have in vain sought for evidence of this in the pictures of the artist himself. Indeed, a careful examination of those pictures with reference to their dates convinces me that, so far from its being true that the painter had thrown himself early and fully into the movement, he had, on the con¬ trary, up to a very late period of his career, held himself back from it, and had clung with an evidently conscious tenacity to the traditions of the primitive German schools.^ I am able to find no picture by him bearing an earlier date than 1512 (I refer once more to the set of four panels at Augsburg) which bears clear evidence of Renaissance influence, either with ' Some of the German writers employ the expression “ Gothic style” to describe the primitive German school as opposed to the Renaissance. The term, though not very scientific, has been so frequently used that I continue to employ it. 26 regard to general style or to the actual presence of classical detail and ornament. His best pictures of about the years 1504-6 show no traces of it. And this fact assumes a greater significance if we turn from his pictures to those of Hans Burgkmair in the Augsburg Gallery. Already, in 1501, we find the work of the latter, through his picture of “The Basilica of St. Peter,” permeated with Renaissance influence. He rejoices in the rich accompani¬ ments of classical architecture and classical ornament, and other pictures in the same style follow in succeeding years. The significance of this com¬ parison seems to be this: that Burgkmair and Holbein the elder repre¬ sented at the opening years of the new century the two different attitudes towards art which for a brief transition period existed within the Swabian school, the former artist cordially sympathizing with the Renaissance spirit, while the latter stood for a time in an attitude of reserve towards it, and accepted it, when he at last did so, as a matter of necessity. And if this view be right, it suggests, I think, a second explanation why an artist of such ability as Hans Holbein the elder failed to hold his own in such a town as Augsburg and ended his life as a bankrupt. The patronage of art in the Swabian capital lay practically in three hands, the Court, the rich merchants, the religious houses. The rich commissions from the first and second of these flowed in upon Burgkmair and his fellows, a poor commission here and there came in to Holbein from the sisters of St. Catherine. It was for Burgkmair to paint the house-fronts of a Fugger or a Peutinger—not that that was a well-paid branch of labour, but it brought fame—with classic processions and symbolic goddesses. It was for him and Schaufelein and Beck to prepare the drawings for the wood-engravers who were to glorify Maximilian in the pages of the “Teuerdanck” or the “ Weisskunig.” But for Hans Holbein there remained a thirty gulden commission from a poor old nun like Walburg Foter or twice the sum from a devout donor like Ulrich Walther, who got some twenty portraits of his family and house¬ hold thrown into the bargain. From 1504 onwards the records of the painter’s impecuniosity are continuous. Money due upon his pictures is stopped to pay his debts. He is sued for small debts of a florin or two florins, and, after he has left Augsburg, brother Sigmund himself sues him, —let us hope it was in charity to forestall some less merciful creditor—for thirty-four gulden expended in the removal of his studio plant to Isenheim. All this points, as it seems to me, in the same direction. Hans Holbein the elder held a position of respect in his own city as a painter, no doubt, but the commissions went to other men who painted more in the new taste. By the time that he had himself consented to come over to it in 1512 it was too late to recover his position. In 1514 his two boys, Ambros and Hans, left the home at Augsburg to seek their own fortune. The mother apparently was already dead, since we hear nothing about her. The father 27 stays on to finish the great Saint Sebastian picture in even that did not suffice to lift his head above water. A year or so later he is gone to Isenheim, and Sigmund, with or without his thirty-four gulden, has migrated to Berne. There was to be no more painting so far as we know for Hans Holbein the elder, and in 1524 the painter’s book at Augsburg records his death. That which will perhaps strike the reader most in this chapter, which is just at its close, is the fact that though it has brought Hans Holbein the son up to the age of seventeen, and though he must have been then a well- trained and M^ell-equipped artist of power far beyond his years, since a year later he produces at Basel his portraits of Jakob Meier and his wife, which clearly proclaim the fact, yet I have been able to mention no single work which can be accepted without question as an example of his art during these early years at Augsburg, unless indeed it be a drawing or two among the sketch-book leaves already referred to. That some of his work is mingled with that of his father in some of the later pictures by the latter we may, in our minds, feel tolerably satisfied. But to separate with certainty the one portion from the other has taxed the powers of the best critics without successful result and without unanimity of conclusion. That the training which he received in his father’s studio was a thorough one admits of no doubt. And thorough training means hard work and plenty of experience. On what work was his hand employed, and where and what were the prentice efforts by which his hand gained its cunning? The absence of all real record either documentary or pictorial is one more of those disappointments which meet us continually as we try to recover the early various strands which presently run together to make the golden thread of some great artist’s career. We can fill the blank only by con¬ jecture and by inferences from probabilities. That he worked continuously under his father’s eye, and probably on his pictures as he grew older; that he found employment amongst the many printers now settled in Augsburg by making drawings for the wood-engravers ; that he learnt his business as a fresco^ painter by helping in some of the many commissions for house- front decorations which were given to artists at that time; that he took a hand here and there in designs for other branches of applied art, and earned a little pocket money by making pencil portraits of his friends the monks of St. Ulric—each of these suppositions can claim for itself a high proba¬ bility, which indeed grows almost into certainty when presently we find him at Basel a past master in each of these departments before he is twenty years old. ^ The word fresco is used throughout the book in the general sense of painting on a wall. I have been unable to ascertain whether Holbein employed the method of true fresco. 28 r> * ■j' i^.>- .\*r > 4 -. r«K«S.^^ .*/»=» 4 *^'^ - r - %>* . 4 *- ir'a ►X. r,- 4 ..VU. ‘I’-J « -•'^Cw • Jj 4 ^*i i 4 m‘ ;S*?' L:*^\ -V vf « tSi fir- . :* « ■ ^‘ 5 ** "• Mit*: - I 4 . A A ilisl •• I •.i'Ji' ttC. _S: •i k^j *|it UJ 'j ^1 -.-.••ssr Wh >» ;r- 4 .*^ : ^•*1 sn .vvv^r^ oa i'^ \ >• r*?;----- h r. -yxJTi:^'^' (* >■ « ri ‘■^ -C* r. v :",rNN L- 4 ^; J!* ■'■ •>f’ / >1 '^ihC K.>---i ■^V>v .-j* 1 :n V 4 i%*^. I > t 1 <'r* 4 . T ♦^. S’- m- **f i4 T.»'i '■. V A- I.'/, VI J.v- .S. Jk t. - \ y-* •■?f t r -y_ ^ r CHAPTER IV A BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE B efore I attempt to deal with the career which lay before Hans Holbein the younger at Basel—whom, for convenience, I shall here¬ after call merely Hans Holbein, or Holbein—it will make for future clear¬ ness if I devote a very brief chapter to an outline of the known facts of his life. These facts will indeed enlarge themselves and take local colour as we deal with them later in the book in connection with his works; but it is inconvenient for the reader to have to search out the facts and the dates of a painter’s life when they are, of necessity, so much mixed up with description and criticism of his art; and this is the more true since it will be necessary from time to time to take some of the pictures, woodcuts, and designs out of their true chronological order for the sake of grouping together certain of his works so that they may be considered side by side. Holbein was, as we have seen, almost certainly born in the city of Augsburg in the year 1497. He remained there till apparently the year 1514, when, with his elder brother Ambros, he left the family home for Basel, passing through, and probably pausing in Ulm, Constanz and Zurich, and arriving in Basel in the first half of the year 1515. At Basel he and his brother at once obtained work as designers for title-pages, printer’s marks, and illustrations for the various printing firms of that city, and, above all others, for John Froben, through whom Holbein made the acquaintance of Erasmus. With the exception of two years, or part of two years, namely, 1517-18, during which he was absent in Lucerne, and amongst other works painted the house-front (destroyed in 1824) of the mayor of Lucerne, Jakob von Hertenstein, he was resident in Basel till 1527, with occasional short journeys to Alsace, Burgundy, and perhaps elsewhere. To this first Basel period belong the greater number of the works which are collected in the museum of the city and one or two impor¬ tant works in other towns. They include the portraits of Jakob Meier^ and his wife (1516), “The Dead Christ” (1521), “The Madonna of Solothurn ” (1522), and “The Meier Madonna of Darmstadt” (1526), the two portraits of Erasmus (in the Louvre and at Longford Castle), and other paintings in oil, besides a very large number of designs for the glass-painter, for the ‘ The name is generally spelt Meyer, after the German method. Upon the whole I have thought it best to preserve the original spelling Meier, as it is found in Fesch’s inventory. 29 woodcutter (including “The Dance of Death”), for the goldsmith, for the armourer; and not a few decorative wall paintings, especially the House of the Dance, all of which have now perished. The decoration of the Rathaus of the city externally and internally with wall paintings, unhappily destroyed, falls within this period. In about 1520 he married his wife, Elspeth Schmid, a widow, and when he left Basel in 1526 he was the father of two children. He travelled in that year to England with letters of introduction from Erasmus to Sir Thomas More, for whose “ Utopia” he had already drawn a title-page, and who was at that moment Lord Chancellor of England. The painter was kindly received by More, and perhaps spent a short time under his roof at Chelsea, but there is no convincing evidence on this point. He remained in England till 1528. To that first English period belong his drawings and paintings of Sir Thomas More and the members of his family, the paintings of William Warham (Louvre and Lambeth), Sir Harry Guildford (Windsor), John Godsalve (Dresden), Sir Bryan Tuke (Munich), and others. His second sojourn in Basel lasted from 1528 to 1531, and, probably owing to the disturbed state of the city, which was in the throes of the iconoclastic troubles that for a time paralyzed all other interests, he pro¬ duced very few works which now remain visible to us. To 1528 apparently belongs the masterly portrait of his wife and two children in Basel Museum. The two remaining internal wall paintings of the Rathaus were completed during this period. On his return to London in 1532 he settled down in the immediate neighbourhood of the Steelyard, the Hanseatic colony of German mer¬ chants in Thames Street, possibly occupying rooms in one of the houses which stood upon the northern end of London Bridge. To this period belong several very fine portraits of the Hanseatic merchants—George Gisze, 1532, now at Berlin; another fine portrait of a merchant, 1533, in the same gallery; Dirk Tybis, 1533 (Vienna), Derick Born (Windsor), and a number of other portraits not connected with the Steelyard, and extend¬ ing over the years which bring us up to his appointment as King’s Painter in 1536. Between that date and his death in 1543 lie many masterpieces of finished portraiture, a great majority of the Windsor drawings, and a large number of designs for various handicrafts. The portraits of Jane Seymour (Vienna), Henry VIII. (Hardwick Hall cartoon and the Munich drawing), of Christina of Denmark (National Gallery), which involved a journey to Brussels, of Anne of Cleves (Louvre), painted at Castle Diiren, the Sieur de Morette at Dresden, the Duke of Norfolk, fall, with many others, within this period. Of the actual details of his life we know little 30 enough. He was lodged in apartments reserved for the Court painters in Whitehall, and his salary of £2.^ ^ was second in value to that of Lucas Hornebout,^ a half-forgotten Fleming. The wall paintings with which he decorated the dining hall at Whitehall perished in the great fire which destroyed so large a portion of the palace in 1697. That he was held in high esteem by the king is proved not only by the two commissions in which he was sent abroad in 1538 and 1539 to paint the portraits of Christina and of Anne, but also by a third commission, falling between the two in 1538, whose purpose is not known, which took him to “ Haute Burgony,” and which gave him the opportunity of a brief visit to Basel. The city council on this occasion endeavoured to retain him for the city, or to induce him to return presently, by an offer of a salary which strikes us as ludicrously inadequate. A form of contract was drawn up in flattering language, and Hans Holbein left them with an assurance of his speedy return. It is indeed quite possible that he may have kept before his eyes the prospect of returning to end his days amongst men of his own speech. But he saw Basel no more. Five years passed and found him still with his hands full of work in England. At the end of that time, in the autumn of 1543, the plague, which was seldom absent from our big seaport towns in those days for many years at a time, had broken out with unusual severity. It is recorded by Stow that in that year the Michaelmas term was adjourned to St. Albans in consequence of the outbreak. In 1861 the will of Hans Holbein was discovered in the archives of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and estab¬ lishes beyond all doubt that the painter died in the parish of St. Andrew’s Undershaft in October or November, 1543, and not, as had been always up to that time believed, in 1554. It has been inferred that he died of the plague, and Karel Van Mander (who, however, gives the erroneous date aforesaid) expressly says that this was so. The place of his burial is not known. If the belief that he died of the pestilence is well founded, he would doubtless have been laid in a nameless general grave outside the precincts of the city. The fact that he was no longer living in the apartments at Whitehall is shown, not only by the will, but also by an entry in the rate book of the city of London so far back as 1541, where the painter is charged what is practically an income tax of ;;^3 out of his salary of £30. The will was executed by his friend John of Antwerp, the celebrated goldsmith for whom Holbein had made designs, and whose portrait, now at Windsor,^ he had painted. The text of the will—which was proved on November 29, i 543 —runs as follows: ‘ The name is spelt in several ways—Hornebolt, Hornebaud, etc. - The identity of this portrait, however, is not quite beyond dispute. 31 “In the name of God the father, sonne, and holy ghooste, I Johnn Holbeine, servaunte of the Kinges Majestye make this my Testamente and last will, to wyt, that all my goodes shal be sold and also my house, and I will that my debtes be paid to wete fyrst to Mr Anthony, the Kynges servaunte, of Grenwiche, ye summe of ten poundes thurtene shyllynges and sewyne pence sterlinge. And more over I will that he shal be contented for all other thynges betwene hym and me. Item, I do owe unto Mr John of Anwarpe, goldsmythe, sexe pounds sterling, which I will also shal be payd unto him with the fyrste. Item, I bequeythe for the Kyping of my two Chylder wich be at nurse, for every monethe sewyne shyllynges and sexpence sterlynge. In wytnes I have signed and sealed this my testament the day of October, in the yere of our Lorde God MVCXLIII. Wytnes, Anthoney Snecher, Armerer, Mr John of Anwarpe Goldsmythe before sayd, Olrycke Obynger, Merchaunte and Harry Maynert, paynter.” A note follows to the effect that John Antwerp, executor to the last will of John, alias Hans Holbeine, recently deceased in the parish of St. Andrew Undershafte, appeared before John Coke, Commissary General, on November 29th, 1543, and that the will was admitted. Holbein left behind him several sons and three daughters, the children of his wife Elspeth, in Basel. Of the sons, whose exact number we do not know, Philip, the eldest, who appears in the portrait group now in Basel Museum, alone assumes for us a clear personality. He became a goldsmith, and was apprenticed to one Jakob in Paris. On his return to Germany he seems to have settled in Augsburg. His son, another Philip Holbein, in 1612 obtained from the Emperor Mathias letters patent permitting him to bear and to amend his ancient and noble coat of arms. This Philip Holbein became the ancestor of the family who, in 1787, were ennobled under the title of “ Holbein of Holbeinsberg.” Of the daughters it is only needful to say that Klingoldt, who married a miller, became the ancestress of the Merians of Basel, a family which supplied quite a large number of engravers and artists to the world. Elspeth, Holbein’s wife, was dead in 1549. His uncle Sigmund had already died in Rome in 1540, leaving our painter all his worldly goods, which were not many. His brother Ambros disappears from knowledge during the painter’s first sojourn at Basel, and probably died before he left for England. An illustration,^ however, to “ Das Gantze Neue Testament,” dated 1523, printed by Froben, is attributed to Ambros Holbein. ^ The illustration in question will be found figured in Walter Crane’s “ Decorative Illus¬ tration,” London, 1896. 32 «IWartP|IE»T- VIRG cVPrjWMEMcTOlt- PRCffiyiS • YBEIUBVi; - 0^^ :BOR-E\NTF.Ma Gf.KLBAi'I>R.O!jlVTRFMKI^IEV'S■ nY-Di ?i..: knew ih.jiX h - v ..^k was to be seen and erhkised b; " ‘r * * ‘ ' thn >f Hoibc'.'v vfho at that moment tv-as to figh^h. , hrrrk ^.?.d beer, isitcd iu ilUi-SU^ a UttJk i ^ iS^y.'* JlHc uw*-i ’ ’vepi^pan-d hia'drawr^ Jn such a fesbioft jui-t i-<^ ’j'-, Bhape.rfbait thr> c/^* Jd he cniplofcd lu liic '.. r.. tf.rc^air d 'ar iroen *^>eing the case ‘iV^’ail sortsand sufT. jW5^h<-d tuk/ fiis .: jod that of tfie nur|;m.dde invading the ■ •,;;. .r! ii Vl jt llr^ niui s^w thcffifc js the fact. Ai one . . Mt ?h?-1. .i t, where Brtooiuif describe^ hi ..4|El4n|it«vh)l tev^nge Bn- siiMi^ on the next page has written the aante^if s^see it draw ing thr: latter had made to Uiuatrajfc a Uoe .y-iratLi^h ^Epicuri dc grege porous." It ls a drawing of .4 iSwain ar a’ table aiid holding a largo Sask to hiz* whik the other is roumd thcf neck of a girf. ii: .' ry.i qr» have be^'fi four/i wh*:* air able bn such c*«‘'.kW<.c h it'-w fc:; svvi- -ciUou^ bv '. ; 'mt onT. rtiinatti ]• , t.- .. rbt: r* tw» r-Jh. " j^sounos ihan tlh« ^ h :h>-i Erasi'^ws. 'J ti.rar v-d'.' <- 4 :.'U 7 ctT painter i. o; -rvj^i^h •'j^r ib^ ou: <’■■'. ib. ..- v’ ahrays ai •-<»■' th^ r-.'.. ; -...Jne ui* luis r.od the bo.')!; iitd Mn il -’li': - that tb- ^drpcad'.'nt co at. ii .a v'eeii been asscrtcfij i . y tWi liOibcifl ■ j iK^itr^cr :e.ui iicir vmttf—*an assertion *' ^ dtsprtn*ed b\ t'l: riamHe/ of wfHtcn nutes, and in 3Ji t'.'f- .tni bu uf, \vhi 4 A ^;c ceiployvi to ittdicatlc the fuUire colouring of hb. V-* xih\ The humour of the too, opcocs '.'ut, ^ivd with, at .times, a -^r. :.*T^v Rvxirrn ^vour. Th»s^ V'hcu Nici'JoUs v- rt^rred to, •t . .. ujuure of the w©4'tbv tl : vk^S i:j b.r-. rs ovjti h..s psalte! iiV o-'rt bi^ tuG^c :a i -cisH ;j4, c,* , ;^. f: js s quaifti o , M v»^ aj ‘ 4(C tilw CsWl/pages .of ‘A^»U I it as if it o-’-'^ ‘''w r-f tvr<. : ' ..;v JT’ Jttcrsy spifit ars to HWi I'lJ ^ypTlip i*i ~i recite ^•^ hi^rt^ ys gs a *- P’-.—nf* ** !■:■ r->;r { \ ^ *-• -• - - - ': ibr: ' . ; .‘- fcMnkinj^ harnio;.; vijiasAO 3HT m JAYAaT:u[ miT .laeAS cynical wit and biting satire of the book itself. It is, by the way, interesting to note a fact which has not, I believe, been observed, namely, that in the passage where Zeuxis and Apelles are mentioned, Holbein’s drawing of the painter at his easel is undoubtedly meant to be a portrait of himself. It must not be forgotten that on their arrival in Basel Ambros Holbein as the elder of the brothers by some two years would have been naturally regarded as the owner of the print studio or painting room. He was, indeed, admitted a full member of the guild Zum Himmel in the year 1517, whereas Hans did not attain that position till the autumn of 1519. And commis¬ sions issued would in some cases be given to the workshop, and would have been carried out by the brothers’ combined labour. This seems to have been the case in a very interesting set of five subjects from the Passion of our Lord, which are preserved in the museum of Basel, and carry the numbers in that collection, i, 2, 3, 4, 5. The inventory of Bonifacius Amerbach, to whom the bulk of the collection once belonged, expressly says that No. I, “The Scourging of Christ,” was the first picture (not the first woodcut design) executed by Hans Holbein in Basel. The inventory is by no means infallible, as we shall have to show on later occasions, but in this instance there is no reason to doubt its accuracy. Four more pictures evidently belonging to the same series have since been obtained for the collection. The five pictures are done on extremely coarse canvas, and in each case a bulky ill-sewn seam runs irregularly across the middle. In almost all his other works Holbein has used panel. And this fact, coupled with the rough and more hasty handling of the pictures, persuades one that they were, as it is generally assumed, prepared for some special occasion to serve a temporary and not a final purpose. That they were not painted to take their place in a church is proved from their remaining in private hands- If they had been in one of the churches they would almost surely have perished in the general destruction of sacred pictures at the iconoclastic outbreak in the city in 1527. They may, however, very well have been painted as temporary “ stations ” at some religious festival. And it is important to remember this, and to judge them by that standard. It would be misleading if we were to criticise their technical qualities as if they represented the true level of Holbein’s capacities. The commission for their execution was probably given to the pair of brothers, who at that time were wisely ready to earn their bread and strengthen their practice by undertaking anything from the decoration of a palace to the painting of a signboard. It is natural to suppose that with such a commission requiring speedy completion a convenient division of labour would be employed, each brother undertaking a certain number of the pictures. We do not know how many the whole series originally comprised, but if they were “ stations ” there are several subjects, as, for example, “The Bearing of the 39 Cross/’ “The Crucifixion/’ “The Deposition,” which must have been included. A careful examination of these pictures has led me to this result, that Nos. 2, 3, “The Agony in the Garden” and “The Arrest,” are wholly by Ambros, while No. i, “The Scourging,” is almost totally by Hans, and No. 4, “Pilate washing his Hands” is wholly by Hans. The view which has been put forward that the pictures were merely executed in great part by the two young men working upon the designs of and as assistants in the studio of some older painter in Basel, does not seem to me to obtain any confirmation either from the probabilities of the case or from any evidence within the pictures themselves. Indeed, there are one or two points which show in the treatment of the incidents and even in certain conventions of colour and representation that the designer of these pictures, Hans or Ambros, or both in union, followed the tradition which they had learned in the studio of their father. For example, in “ The Arrest of our Lord ” St. Peter is represented in the act of cutting off the ear of Malchus, who lies as he has fallen, his lantern beneath him, while Christ, who is being seized by the soldiers, stretches down His hand to touch the ear and heal the wound. Precisely the same rendering of the incident will be found in a picture of the elder Holbein at Augsburg representing the same scene. Moreover, the younger painters have even followed the tradi¬ tional set of colours for the dresses of the various apostles which they had seen used by their father. St. Peter, for instance, wears a dark green-blue robe with a white over-cape or blanket, the types of the faces of the apostles being also identical with those in the Augsburg series of Holbein the elder. And if we have to suppose some older master of Basel as the giver of the designs, and the overseer, as one must also presume, of their execution, it is highly improbable that he should have “ thrown back ” in the case of two of the pictures to the motives and idiosyncrasies of Hans Holbein the father, while in one of them at least, the “ Pilate washing his Hands,” he as evidently forecasts the manner of the son, who so far had exhibited no work in Basel. And one has to ask who was this unknown Basel painter,^ or rather what other works are there by any painter known or unknown at Basel at that time which resemble these very powerful although unformed works, which we are to consider. If we are answered that the fact of their having been carried out by the two Holbein brothers so obscured the original designs, motives, and manner that the identity of the older designer has been completely overlaid in the process, and that the work has become practically theirs, one asks in that case where is the necessity for calling into existence this older painter at all ? Is he not a somewhat gratuitous assumption ? I can, indeed, for my own part, not find any reason, either on the ground of technique or of manner of treatment, for thinking that any ‘ Hans Herbster has been suggested. 40 PILATE WASHING HIS HANDS BASEL Cross/* "Tht ■T>/‘ '"The hz^;^ t)irn included. A cjmV" :■ fx'i{Cinition uf these pictuf^-^ hia^* JtaiiMfc I ' ^ *<^^11, that Nos %, ’*.. ■ I'hc ^-^^ony in the Gaid^-c 4%i ’ Qife AiRfe^v, .;rc wholly hj Atab rv. uhilc Na i, ’’The Scou^^i^"* k* ihBW|l b>* Han.:, >f>i N'* ■ relate x^-ashiog his Hands" is wh-'dy ^ The vj^n ' b>s put forward that the pictures .'.i v^cti axr- iti? trtc young ix>‘:n wrkine upon the ;X and as wn to iTtj u> a^-cdSiKaiu^IlQiftii^^ 'he pA^nbditic:^ cas^ cr .. Indeed, there &f« oue t ._,:x 'fcfci.fi. ..' ^ *• mculenu and cvxa in ccna:r . *«:. .* • * ♦ii ePf* *‘»-:ti^‘^v5 -i’' •^ t'h ‘i the dcsii^cr ihci.c ps^ttu^-^ I'j' gr Uosh ui v:>fi traditiuo which . they hadteanre ' t ' tf«-stiidk>»J theii ia'>-7 - ^ eo^ffe^ia ‘TheArrest ouf* St Peter is represented ;n . . .» » - >-:r . ? . ^..'. • : •- :■ be found in a picture the elder Htdticiit itt iUigsbw^ - same Scene. Moreos'.r. ^h. s'^Kjftgcr pointers have cv^jn fo^*M tuv.ial set df ; : V ih of the various .:us-»4b.>.J used by t jo^ance, w-'^rs a darl' r r'.r- =tK a '.'^'■ •- Of iwrbf the facts c*' ■: ^■ a'j -■ ■ c -t'-:j 4 .Wricsof Holt.-, ..\ *.' *Afi^ *f ys. : >■ tr.: >is^ .^f Basel as thcgtvc= - cc •‘' " t ih^ir .xccuboi*. r ,- higbi^ -w^UtAabvr thM he iiinFtV.^ t;.. ■ .)! the case of cvt ■ ut pictui^ lo lhe»to;iv-55^ xfV$ i r . ■ . *• . a-' ■ ;'io:l»ein Uic Uihcr. witUc m otie of th^m at icar-i* /' v - i*ig jiis Hands,’ U- as ■::vidtntly forecasts the fl>afu»cr • i i he h.- far had exhibited c ■ ^ in Basel. And one has to aslt uhe v.-i- thi-j unknown Basel pai i .. <» rather what other woijcs are there b) any painter known .>’■ 3 ? Jiaadat Uia? *iiBC which resemble these very powerful -iHh* \ ^ worts. w‘: ..^ wf are u> oonsuiof If vc ;tre apivc-jMc aft hjX'JO^: Iv.--' <^iied 6^ fcv ■ AS. ■■^. ..«•!« b: 'C||i6&4 »£• 'll-: ir.*s Ix-.xs cosnp.:' ■ - is'^ ■/• - \k:‘ ^ii^ U-cwnc .fracikaJly theifv - .'^-.i. ■' *i?»r for calling into existence 'h:- pa^Mcf <«i ‘ i ■ .- ? i vi--i**(Eut grattiib^us assumption ? I can, iredccd. for iJi) larir --ji e f -t i«fti a»r r%a$ou, tUbc tha; the great ce ntral facts arc not Inrst itnprtssed tlirr-u>^' insistence on the most distressing accompaniment s and that the realtas faettea' the greatet facts when tho asiiiOcUted iaus arc to it with th^ most distracting reafism. The sentiments of pi!y, jfmtit deep devotion, are, in fact, as most people have cxperien‘jed, stirre- mofe deeply by many a representation of the scene which u;w^ucstjt>iui»i. im Ur less of resemblance to the terrible reality, and yet succeeds ■ presentjag the true dignity of the . uffering to the mind. There are. Uj t,: one example,.on the wall of the imer church -T Si«.i> Mauri/Jo at >nruin^ of a.faded, fast vanishing fresex* of *‘The Mockery.” andanothe; the Scourging,” which Bernardino I tnni plated Uierc in his grave, gci ■ fuiicnit st)'k Vhc reader who hapjicns to Itnow thdr.e work:! -well will aware of their i-tnguUrty impressive and enduringeftecl port the mcmoi But Holbein takes the ^ ir % and, taking it, he produce.^ th* jmmodUtc effect which he aims at, namely, to rralixc the sveuv h* With n foscc and sincerity whndi is beyond ail dispute. I ««i aware that the paragraph whkh I 1: .vc jnit . ’ .'r ,.^v me *pcii ii.' the rtiafge, which it i • ilv*ayx easy to makc. of > iy th.it Art have a ;r.. oCSk it ir vWa'n motr tr. *H Vt us fr.tn . .! ; t jHc aittrrent phrase; * A can be ^anher hccii my ''ctteTor frtsm my lai^r* ■ Hilt w) \n i-i raeely mule t^^e t i.gu^c in which tc.v*;hii> c-A ^ -. dceOTrt r ; . tf> He ajovcsr i r-v* lUc.i the afti.ft places .* . ■ ..rej’ h ^ ^ bit'>r^-.iab'iy div-. vvhcfthctelccis-s peitgiifu; - •* (or a then it bct.imes tit oner the y^vwni-.c critidxRi iM ask h-;>w’ far ti.*: purpo.se has been fnltiHcd it; the eff,3cu (TUCRir by the pdrtkufar fiEatment of the themt—how far tha sermon ^ L»cen preaclied in the best poasiblfr way. That Art need not take upon h> any %uch j/Urposc unlcs'' h likes, is an axiom admitted of .*en. 1 hat very olten elects to do so, and lims a perfect right to do so, Uo,^ii;dly an axio ’.nd HMNrin cannot be thoroughly understood unless vwr a«ure nursclx ^at h.tf did froro first Ust pDjtil, not merely ns artist of Iw -tiso as thiril'fT; pfclfosophef. preachcr/ii you will Vou cant ioolr at!«'- vwk fnro the *'• >*ne pohrt of view as that Tro'm'which y.At tw*.. survey : -:^i3sihir i-rjn^ Hal - ^he gay WaUeaii. To do so iti ; miss o.:i ^uJf the man 1 atv. nor at thiy nitmicnt to di:-cu-s ? ’ 1 1« U5l iRCcn4 t<* tmjWy tiiii th» •.•>c (*!rr l'.« ^bW; bui merely ih*: evidemextukt nt* efleehre hehnjt »n hiii4«^iry n.*5u't from Ufee iier«tat(vn of d>c anoti p^vrirw! <‘f'-iyu*s ;r-.v <•. >•. TSiaKO '^o o;^io;iijoDa hht -la^iAa question whether Holbein or any other artist does well or ill to ally his art to a purpose. All that I here say is that Holbein frequently did so, and that it has been done by many of those whose names stand highest in art, and it is at least as extravagant to say that Art should never have a moral purpose as it is to say that it must never exist without one. Watteau was a great artist; Jean Fran9ois Millet was a great artist. We do not deny to either the title because the one rarely or never painted with any purpose beyond a delicious colour scheme, or because the other rarely painted with¬ out a conscious purpose. Holbein in his early religious works, and above all in his “ Dance of Death,” deliberately preaches a sermon. But he never allows the artist to obscure the preacher, nor the preacher to obliterate or to weaken the artist. The technical qualities of the picture, “The Scourging of Christ,” which have compelled these remarks, are, as we have said, to be judged in the light of the circumstances under which it seems to have been painted, namely, as a temporary “ station ” for some religious occasion. The drawing, though not quite faultless, is fine and expressive, the colour (though it has found praise at the hand of German critics) being harsh and unharmonious. The contrasts of crude colour have not in this instance been reduced to any degree of accord. A noticeable detail is the thick, strong outline which Holbein uses, not only around the figure, but even for the edges of his buildings where they strike against the sky. For example, on the right- hand side of the picture the light comes in with considerable strength at the door of the building. Yet down the edges of the brickwork where it meets the sky, and where, therefore, the highest light would naturally fall, there runs a strong brown line. This convention, though it contradicts a truth which in later days has been entirely recognized, belonged to the older schools, and had been inherited from them. Probably, in the case of one who worked so much as Holbein for the wood-engravers, it was an unalterable convention, which at that time his observation had not enabled him to overcome. He uses it in a much modified degree in his later days, but to the very last he never entirely abandoned it, surrounding his figures, and even the side of a face nearest to the light, with an exceedingly fine, often almost invisible line. He never arrived at the practice, which was to be reserved for the great masters of a later century, whereby modelling, relief, the detachment of figures and faces from their surroundings, and also the fusing of them with their surroundings by means of the piny of light upon them and of the presence of atmosphere around them, were to be absolutely rendered. Holbein is a superb artist in the old methods, and in spite of them; but he did not, as has sometimes been said of him, inaugurate the modern method. By far the finest of this early series, both in colour and achievement, 43 is the other example which I have already claimed for the hand of Holbein alone, namely, “ Pilate washing his Hands.” On the other hand, it is less vivid than they in its power of expression. Pilate, in the conventional Eastern turban and headdress, is not a very convincing figure as he washes his hands and turns away with an hypocritical air from Christ, who is being led away by, or rather driven in front of the executioner. This latter figure is evidently given us in the garb of the time—he was an official who was only too often to be studied in the cities of Europe of that day—and his hideous dress and uncouth appearance are set as a foil to the gentle and submissive figure of the Saviour. At the foot of Pilate s dai's stands an attendant clad in the yellow and black uniform such as was worn probably by a Landsknecht out of armour. He holds the basin and ewer with which Pilate washes his hands, and he is the finest figure in the group both in drawing and in colour. The details of the picture are wrought with care, remarkable care indeed, considering the roughness of the materials and the nature of the work. They show evidences of the painter’s astonishing power, already much developed, of rendering all objects with a fidelity which goes as far as it is possible to go in the direction of actual reality, and yet stops short of the stage at which the vulgarity of mere deception is arrived at. The power which he here shows over his mere accessories— look, for example, at the rendering of the marble steps of the judgement throne on which Pilate’s seat is placed—is the same power which is to find its culmination in later years in the " George Gisze” and “The Ambassa¬ dors,” a power which, surprising as it is in some of its manifestations, is always subordinated to the greater interests, the human interests and the dramatic interests of his picture. To the first year of Holbein’s sojourn in Basel belongs an interesting panel, now sawn in two to show both sides, which he painted as a sign¬ board for a schoolmaster. It was of no great size, and must have once projected in front of the pedagogue’s door at no great height above the eye, since the lettering is small and the two little scenes beneath are not visible at a great distance. The inscriptions on the two sides, alike in both instances, announce on behalf of the owner of the board to man, maid, or child that he is prepared to teach all comers the art of reading and writing—in the case of adults payment to be by results, and any persons proving incapable of learning to read or write are to be discharged free of cost. Beneath these alluring notices are the two little scenes, in one of which the master and his wife are seen teaching the children, while in the other the men, squaring the elbows and stooping the back, are seen endeavouring to acquire the mysterious arts. These two little interiors are painted with something of the affectionate pleasure of a seventeenth-century Dutchman. It is evident, indeed, that not only was Holbein ready to accept any commission which 44 /• . nie^.e^r. came to him, but that he was ready to do his best by it, and ready to do nothing short of that. And his reward came to him less in the shape of the gulden that flowed in from it, for they were few enough, than in the splendid practice which he obtained by it. There are several more pictures in the Basel Gallery which belong to these same years, the head of a St. John, the head of the Virgin wearing a crown, and an Adam and Eve on one panel, all of them small pictures, and either wholly or partially retouched, though not recently, so that they need not detain us, especially as we have from the year 1516 an example to examine which at once places him on its own merits amongst the leading portrait painters of any age. The painter’s connection with Hans Froben and with Erasmus brought him doubtless into touch with many of the leading men of Basel. Amongst these was Jakob Meier, known, according to the custom of the day and place, as “ Zum Hasen,” from the sign of the house next to the town hall in which he lived. He had been elected burgomaster in 1516, and he held the office year after year till 1521. In religion he was a staunch adherent of the old Catholic party, but the question as yet had not burnt to that white heat in Basel which it was to reach a few years later, and a man could still belong to the old Catholic party and yet be in thorough sympathy with the moral, intellectual and social reform within the Church for which men of the mind of Erasmus and Sir Thomas More were eager. In politics he belonged to the popular or democratic party in the city, being indeed the first burgomaster of Basel who was not of noble birth, and it was during his term of office that the stringent ordinances were passed by the city council whereby the powers and privileges of the nobles were curtailed, and by one of which the bishops were debarred from enter¬ ing the council. A few years later, in 1521, when the gap had grown wider between the old Catholics and the Reformers, the hostile party in the council procured his downfall on a charge, whose truth it is now impossible to estimate, of having accepted a larger pension or fee from the King of France as a reward for the supply of mercenary soldiers than the law permitted. He never returned to office, and after the iconoclastic troubles in Basel in 1527 the decree by which he was debarred from office was made final. Before that time had come, however, he had linked his name permanently with that of Holbein by giving him the commission, apparently in 1526, for the “ Meier Madonna” now at Darmstadt. But in 1516 no such troubles seemed to lie before the new burgomaster of Basel and the young wife, Dorothea Kannengiesser, whom he had not long married. It was probably in celebration of this event that he gave to Hans Holbein the commission to paint the portraits of himself and of his wife. They hang together in one frame at Basel in the room where the oil 45 paintings of the master are collected, while the preliminary drawings in chalk are amongst the sketches in the adjoining gallery. Holbein is now about nineteen years old. Scarcely two years have passed since he left his home an unknown artist, whose promise seems to have so far escaped the notice of his fellow-townsmen in a great art centre such as Augsburg, that no indisputable work from his young hand was preserved there, and that he was allowed, for lack of opportunity, to go in search of a living elsewhere. A young journeyman, not old enough yet to take his place with his fellow painters, bakers, and leatherworkers in the guild “Zum Himmel ” at Basel, meanwhile comes before us in this pair of portraits as a fully accomplished artist, complete in his power of vision, complete in his grasp of character, completely assured of his methods and technique, no longer feeling his way as a beginner, but self-possessed, unhesitating, in a word, a Master. He is already Holbein—young Holbein, perhaps, but lacking no single element of the greatness of the future man. He was to paint indeed stronger, more striking portraits than these here¬ after—portraits in which every quality of his genius should receive greater emphasis. But each and all of these superb qualities is already here. Holbein is here in them already of full stature, though not of full maturity. He is here in these portraits of Jakob Meier and his wife completely the man who was to paint the “George Gisze,” the “Christina of Denmark,” the “ Sieur de Morette.” The difference is one of degree only. No principle of seeing, of interpreting, of recording—the three essentials of portrait painting which he uses here—were ever laid aside by him, as some artists are compelled as they go forward to lay aside the visions of their youth ; they are in Holbein’s case hardly even modified, merely intensified. Each of the portraits is painted in three-quarter face, the wife turning to her right, the husband to his left. Jakob Meier wears a black loose upper robe with an open white front, gold embroidered, and on his head a scarlet cap. He holds in his hand a gold piece, in token, no doubt, that in his first year of office the city had received from Maximilian the privilege of minting its own gold coins. He is a dark-eyed, brown-haired, ruddy-complexioned man, in whose burly face are shown shrewd humour and common sense, to¬ gether with a certain look of earnestness which we find again in it ten years later as he kneels before the Madonna in the great picture. The background is filled with classical columns and arches which bear bronze-gold Renaissance decoration, such as Holbein always loved to paint. A patch of bright blue sky is shown through the opening and is set behind the scarlet cap—a bold venture in colour, but perfectly successful and free from all crudeness—once more, indeed, a happy reconciliation of contrasts. Dorothea Kannengeisser is an even more delightful portrait. She wears a white and gold cap of the shape which appears so often in that day in the costumes of a burgher's 46 erv- wife ; I am not acquainted with the technical name for it. Her boddice is a deep crimson with black bands and beautifully rendered embroidery across the chest. The painting of this detail is as masterly as anything which he accomplished at any time, and in handling it very much reminds one of the work which is to be seen in his subsequent portrait of Anne of Cleves. But here again, consummate as the painting of detail is, it is to the face of the person that we are at once attracted. She was not a beautiful woman, but she had an interesting expression, and was, with her clear fresh German complexion and her strong type of face, pleasant to look at, and the ideal of a burgomaster’s wife. The colour of the picture, as so often happens in a woman’s portrait, is greatly helped by the accidents of the costume, by the whites and golds of the headdress, by the delicious richnesses of the embroidery and the clear and brilliant flesh tones. Against these is set the bright blue of the sky behind, and the whole forms a delicate and charming colour scheme. The drawings are hardly less delightful and hardly less complete than the finished paintings. One may even say that they suggest colour, as every genuine drawing by Holbein always does, with hardly less clearness to the understanding, though of course with less sensuous delight to the eye. As a piece of character reading the two drawings strike one as even more satis¬ factory than the paintings, and this is especially so in the case of the wife. They are, as indeed any drawing of Holbein which I have seen never fails to be, quite convincing. One feels no doubt that one has before one the actual man or woman as they did indeed live and look on that day when Holbein looked into their faces. His power of grasping all that there was to grasp in the man’s inward character and in his outward expression of it immediately, completely, is of the nature of second sight—an extra sense bestowed on Holbein, and never in a like degree on any other. The achievement of such a pair of portraits would, one might have thought, have been immediately followed by commissions from the burghers of Basel and their wives. The absence of other portraits of that year or of the two years immediately following does not bear out the expectation, and the fact that next year, 1517, he left Basel to undertake work at Lucerne seems rather to suggest that the former city was no gold mine to an artist. The many designs for handicrafts which are preserved from the hand of Holbein during the entire period of his first sojourn at Basel, 1515-15271 show that a certain amount of employment was to be had by an artist of such capacity as Holbein, who was willing to work for printer or armourer, goldsmith or bookbinder, without reserve. But such work was probably very poorly paid. The larger commissions, for painted portraits and for pictures, were evidently scarce, since the whole output of painted pictures during the eleven years of his Basel period is not large if we may consider, 47 as it seems certain that we may, that we possess a great proportion of it. No doubt in his connection with Froben and the other printers of Basel Holbein already had a source of income which to some extent protected him from want. But Lucerne was sufficiently near to Basel to allow him to continue his work for the wood-engravers without serious interruption. At all events, it is quite evident that Basel did not offer inducements enough to prevent his migrating for a while to a neighbouring city. It is not probable that he undertook that migration without a direct promise of work, and such a promise seems to suggest itself in the commission which we at once find him engaged upon on his arrival in Lucerne in 1517* namely, the painting of the facade and interior of the house of Jakob von Hertenstein, a leading citizen of Lucerne, who had been mayor of the city a year or two before, and who in 1515 had begun the building of a new house for himself, and now intrusted Holbein with its decoration. 48 CHAPTER VI WALL PAINTINGS E have several times in the earlier chapters of this book had to refer V V to the taste for the external decoration of houses with wall paintings and coloured ornament, which prevailed largely amongst the southern cities of Germany, and perhaps nowhere more than in Augsburg itself. There perhaps Holbein served his apprenticeship to the art, or at any rate saw enough of its technicalities to have learnt all that was required for it. The practice was so universal that there can have been but few intervals during which there was not some work or other of the kind going on in his native city. The work was evidently not very highly paid in Germany, nor yet apparently very highly esteemed, if we may judge by the deprecatory tone of the contract, already alluded to, which the municipality of Basel tried to draw up with Holbein in 1538. The preamble sets forth that they, the council, quite realize that Holbein’s art is of far too great value to be spent upon the decoration of old walls and houses,,” and the council had been showing, and were continuing to show, the sincerity of their belief by allowing the works which Holbein had painted on the walls of their town hail to go to total decay. But though the pay was small, hardly so great, even allowing for the difference in purchasing value of money, as would now be paid to a house-painter for his “ three coats throughout,” yet it was often undertaken by artists of repute, as, for example, by Diirer at Nuremberg, Burgkmair at Augsburg, and Tobias Stimmer at Schaffhausen. The delight of having a large surface to decorate more than compensated the true artist through the opportunity it gave him of expressing his colour sense on a broad scale. None of these external works by the great artists of Germany are left for us to see. The life of a wall painting exposed to the action of the weather was, even in the climate of Italy, not a very long one, and north of the Alps it could hope for but a very short span. One is therefore surprised that the paintings which Holbein executed in 1517 on the facade of the Hertenstein house at Lucerne should have still been in existence in 1824, in which year, incredible as it now seems to us, the house, in spite of strong remonstrance, was swept away with all Holbein’s paintings, by its owner, a banker named Knorr. Indeed, the hand of fate has fallen heavily on all Holbein’s work of this description. All that he did at Lucerne, at Basel, and in London, has perished. Work of this sort has 49 H indeed three chief enemies—Time, Accident, and the hand of Man, and all these three forces seem to have combined against Holbein. The house at Lucerne was pulled down while its paintings were still sufficiently preserved for copies to be made of them. The House of the Dance and other houses in Basel had already been demolished in the previous century. The decor¬ ations in the Rathaus of Basel perished through neglect. His wall paintings at Whitehall disappeared in the fire which in 1697 destroyed the great part of the palace. “The Triumph of Poverty ” and “ The Triumph of Riches,” which had adorned the Guild Hall of the Steelyard, were allowed to pass out of knowledge. No single work remains (though a few small fragments are preserved here and there) which will enable us to form any opinion as to the colour scheme and general effect of Holbein’s work in this material, and under conditions that call out qualities for the possession of which easel pictures afford no guarantee. How interesting it would have been if we had possessed even one great decorative work by Holbein which we could have set for comparison side by side with Mantegna’s “Triumph of Caesar.” The few small preliminary studies which have survived from Holbein’s own hand do not afford the evidence which we require. The somewhat more numerous copies on a small scale by other hands, often executed when the wall paintings themselves were far advanced in age, and often handled, moreover, in a manner which tells us that we have in them the designs of Holbein seen through the eye of a not very accurate, though very dull copyist, give us perhaps even less safe ground for attempting to decide what the colour effect seen on a large scale really would have been. In a book which is devoted to the work of Holbein, it is impossible to omit some kind of description of these works, but it is equally impossible not to feel the very unsatisfactory nature of the investigation. An important street in one of the cities of South Germany or Swit¬ zerland in the sixteenth century must have been a pleasant thing to the eye of a passer-by with its gaily painted house-fronts. This outward expression of the joy of living, which was the keynote of the Renaissance as it affected the individual and the citizen, was no mere outcome of the spirit of ostenta¬ tion or pride of wealth. Those motives doubtless influenced many, as they have done at all times and do to-day. Yet for the majority it was no more the spirit of ostentation which led them to make the outsides of their houses pleasant for the eyes of others as well as their own, than it is in the case of many men of our day, who mark their love of their home by making it as beautiful as they can. In the sixteenth century Art still looked outward to the street rather than inwards on the four walls of a room. It was, especially in the free cities of Germany and Switzerland, a manifestation of that com¬ munal spirit by which each burgher as a matter of course, and with hardly a consciousness of any set purpose in the matter, did his part towards SO making his city beautiful and pleasant to dwell in, not for himself alone, but for all who shared its life with him. That was the spirit of that day and of that social condition. The modern spirit has changed with changed conditions. If one who lives in one of our towns will have his house-front pleasant to look upon he does it because he likes it, and hardly because he has any sense of duty towards the commune. Conversely, if he choose to destroy that which is beautiful and which has given pleasure to others, he does not recognize any interest in that question beyond his own. The beautifying of cities and towns must be left to the municipalities, he says : it is a matter for the rates and taxes. The private individual in modern life recognizes in very rare instances that he has it in him to contribute to or to subtract from the joy of life to others. And we find, therefore, that the burgher of Ulm or Augsburg, of Basel or Lucerne, so soon as he could afford it, rejoiced to add to the brightness and the interest of his town by making his house-front pleasant. In the sixteenth century and in that part of Europe it took the form of surface painting, just as in the towns of Northern Germany, in Osnaburg, for example, it took the form of gaily-painted wood carving. If in having one’s house-front painted one could hit on a Burgkmair or a Holbein, and he could be had for the price, all the better; if not, then the best that could be got. In some cases, indeed, the house was to be painted inside as well, especially if it happened to be for one who was a mayor in prospect or in fact, and civic hospitalities might be expected. But as a rule the paintings seem to have been confined to the front of the house—scriptural subjects, classical subjects, incidents with a fine moral from the '‘Gesta Romanorum,” gods and goddesses, virtues personified, merrymakings, scenes of sport, and the inevitable complement of garlands and festoons, gryphons and sphinxes, pilasters and capitals—a strangely mixed assemblage of subjects, no doubt, but offering a perpetual interest to the passer-by. It was, indeed, a cheap picture gallery offered to those who could afford no pictures for themselves. The poorest might see though he could not possess. Now he can neither see nor possess. And the public spirit which was in the main involved, even though it was mixed at times with less admirable motives, helped to develop the true communal sense—the feeling in men that the streets of a city somehow belonged to them, and they might take a pride in them. At all times this feeling has been stronger in continental cities than in our own; even to-day the characteristic survives, and the home of the people seems to be in their own streets, and they are more at home in them than is the case in our own towns. Therefore, though there was little reward in proportion to the labour from these house-painting commissions, yet the circumstances were inspir¬ ing to an artist, and to one who preferred fame to money, and work to 51 both, they offered opportunities which were not otherwise to be found. One may feel pretty sure that most artists who undertook those tasks did their best with them, since they were to spend their existence, however short that might be, in full view of a generation of critics who were in their rough way not the worst of judges on such matters. To Holbein, indeed, as to some other artists, such as the Van Eycks or Durer, it was a constitutional impossibility to do less than his best. And Holbein’s best by the year 1517 had already shown itself to be very good. Alas ! that when we have said this we have said all that can really guide us to an opinion as to the quality of the work which Holbein did on this his first recorded experiment in the task of outdoor decoration on a large scale. On the fagade the subjects which we know of were Leaena before her Athenian judges, on the occasion when she bit out her tongue rather than witness against her lover Aristogeiton, and Tarquin with Lucretia, both of them having reference, though somewhat obscurely, to the administration and the perversion of justice. In the interior of the house he painted on one large wall the Vision of the fourteen saints who had appeared, according to tradition, to a poor shepherd of Bamberg, 1445, ^ vision whose fame was great at that moment in South Germany. On another wall he painted seven saints above, with the figures of the donor and his family below, while a third wall held a triumphal procession. In the great hall, or hunting hall, which is said to have been still quite complete at the time of its destruction, he painted amongst other frescoes the Fountain of perpetual youth, a very favourite subject at that date, which Lucas Cranach and Altdorfer and others had already handled. The date, 1517, appeared on a portion of this painting. For one of these, for the Leaena before the Judges, the original sketch . exists at Basel, while for the Vision of the fourteen saints, for the Seven Saints with donors, and for the Fountain of youth, besides fragments which still survived in other rooms of the house, copies were made, but unfortu¬ nately of a very poor and inadequate description, before the house was swept away in 1824. But it can hardly seem profitable to spend much time in attempting to reconstruct these works from the evidence of copies which give an untrustworthy idea of the design, and none at all of the colour scheme and final effect. Yet, as we read of the shepherd and the fourteen saints, and again of the seven saints with the donor’s family, our thoughts naturally turn to the Madonnas of Solothurn and of Darmstadt, painted not many years later, and we cannot but argue through these latter works that these were achievements in which Holbein would have been likely to have been seen at his best, since they needed something of the same spirit and offered something of the same opportunities as those surviving master¬ pieces. It is, indeed, impossible to estimate the loss to our knowledge of 52 Holbein’s art which was inflicted by the unhappy destruction of the Hertenstein house. It will be convenient, in spite of the slight violation of chronological order which must result, to mention here the wall paintings which Holbein executed at Basel after his return thither in 1517. It is probable that he decorated not a few houses there, since the words of the Basel Council in 1538, already quoted, in which they deprecated the waste of his talent on the painting of old walls and houses, could hardly have been used if two examples only of such work existed in Basel. But of two only at the present day are we able to gather any particulars, namely, the House of the Dance (Haus zum Tanz), probably painted in about 1520, and the wall paintings of the Rathaus in 1521-2; one or two original sketches and designs by Holbein himself still exist, and some copies were also made by other hands, as in the case of the Lucerne paintings before the destruction of the originals. The House of the Dance, destroyed in 1779, stood in the Eisengasse near the Great Bridge. In the decoration of its front and sides Holbein must have departed from the principles by which he seems still, to a great extent, to have limited himself in the earlier work at Lucerne. For, whereas in the Hertenstein house he dealt, so far as we can judge, with the facade as a flat surface, treating it as a great space to be decorated with pictures, and (except where he once allowed the spectator’s eye to penetrate to an imaginary interior) merely adapting his design to the windows, doors, and architectural features, so as to avoid ugly interference from them, in this House of the Dance he abandoned this method and adopted a style of decoration by which the whole facade was turned into a museum of archi¬ tectural illusions, paint being made to do what architecture alone should have done. That is to say, that the building being in the old Swiss style with an arcade of pointed arches, he deliberately transformed the whole into a Renaissance front, employing columns, architraves, cornices and festoons, and concealing the existing features by dexterously using them to produce the effect of an architectural style which was not their own. And he even went so far as to select a certain point of view from which it should be compulsory to look at the house if the spectator was to obtain the full effect of these perspective contrivances and optical illusions with which he had amused the eye. This point of view seems to have been opposite to the angle formed by the front and side of the house. And it follows from this, that if viewed from any other point, it would fail to give its effect, and there¬ fore fail as a piece of decoration. On the lowest plane Holbein had painted the side of the house so as to give the effect of stables with a horse and groom seen inside over a low wall, while nearer to the angle came a painted portal which let the eye pass 53 to a staircase painted within it. Higher up in the front the pointed arches of the fa9ade were falsified by round arches painted about them in such a way as to make them appear to be the mere result of the intersection of the groining of the interior. And in doing this Holbein obliterates an existing Gothic feature, and endeavours to replace it by a Renaissance feature. Above this row of arches came a flat band which he utilized for his painted frieze of peasants dancing wildly to the music of the bagpipes. This vigorous and exhilarating bit of realism it was which gave the name to the house, and was evidently the feature of the whole. Above this came a series of gods and goddesses amidst painted pilasters on the flat spaces between the windows of the second storey, and above this again a balcony which was made to seem as if it carried men and ladies who looked down into the street. Higher still came medallions, and yet higher grotesque ornaments and Renaissance floriations ; while the topmost storey of all was painted to resemble battlements and turrets. Perhaps, if we had to state the general principle which governed the whole treatment, we should be reduced to saying that it consisted mainly of making everything look like some¬ thing else. It will be seen from this that Holbein in the Haus zum Tanz deliber¬ ately gave himself over to methods which contradict some of the first prin¬ ciples which should limit the decoration of flat surfaces in colour. He does not ask you to look at a flat surface which you recognize as such, and on which an artist has painted his picture with as frank an acceptance of the circumstances as if he had painted a picture on a canvas, but he asks you to penetrate the surface, as it were, and to go with him inside the house. He gives you a perspective, and asks you to deceive yourself into the belief that you are looking through the wall into a room, a staircase, or a stable inside. He asks you to look at a flat wall with pointed arches and irregular windows, and to believe that it is a Renaissance front with all its appur¬ tenances of column and architrave and cornice, and that the windows are^ not really windows, but something else. And in order to persuade yourself of all this you must place yourself where he asks you, and get yourself into the frame of mind which he requires of you. Indeed, it is plain that on this occasion he gave full rein to his extraordinary power of rendering natural objects in paint to the very point of illusion, in order to produce a series of surprises and ocular deceptions, considering that the purpose and the occasion justified him. For it is to be observed that among his easel pictures, which contain many passages of the most dexterous and realistic painting of inanimate objects, he never allows this power of his to go beyond the limit which his true instinct as an artist laid down for him.^ Here, how- ' The apparent exception to this statement in the skull which appears in the “Ambassadors” may be otherwise explained. 54 PORTION OF THE HOUSE OF THE DANCE AT BASEL BERLIN PRINT ROOM S^r>:a ^rtudst 'jit.4ke fiAt .-^pi^-ll Aimirtwi t!)r «erx«4 sctir^^.jl^ i?)(5>^' ti& ^4la a !wJa^(^‘ = ^■' • 'f it ea^itJ nsen'.D'i^^sdtf kofrc^fpCft^bF j ■«tre«- )Q[%iiEKaUU tame nwiialiion^ *nil y4iMt ;jtttant of the cbbMi^uioeotaK it hehad yuio^ a peto^^ aVanva^ hat hci|3h» you Vo ysoftsiat thk-Jwrf*K,Jl^C =**1,0 ’**11’. him iosi;^.^ house. '&i'to 2tc jbelief tshnl *1^ it4ii>om,a .staivase, or a stable T%arbt wulripciawaf aitij^and imgutae H ii It jfea4-«M£D*^frniu wit'k ju appui- cS^«iKw> •fnip^^|g4 pmSjfe^'-sWsi that tht iamfows art ***li^^ l»fWrMnde r .>rsd7 •i| «fs( 4 SriBS> tM.r 5 ld.^jfc) 5 «if iato li^ kiMMrot vSet41|: ss^ywii' Sir« « i^tewrJ^ itk snot^i^dieaiyV^irwsM of feoJ|f^.g natural ^h-a.V' '■* secies «f 4m’‘^?^’^’: •■ c^- W •A'. • ■ -^3..^.^*:ii f^l ■. ^ ^ 4 ffl* iti 7 *V.;• *” •'* ;'*'.‘*T.- 'rt.* - ■>* ■•’; W:?t ^>-.•-•*'/s^v>v l^v ' r ^ . ♦ ' « • . • • V* • < 1^ • . » . ■ '■ 4 *-y*^'-, 4 .•'► -■.' :• : .■•V.vSi;»i-:r . ‘^. • .>y «■ ^ !->•. ..• . . - - JV#*-' IvV ■•' v A'- - • ,.'f- ^ •*1 *•*’n • »• ‘' ' J^'^- *.:^ -V' r I'ik-.A. ^ r 5 »v-.- . •f A * ^ -1.. ■» ‘t :wv '^ji !> W- ' . first arrival. For Froben, for Adam Petri, and for Johann Wolff, the chief printers of Basel, he continued to produce drawings on the wood, which were cut sometimes indifferently, sometimes well, and at times superbly by the wood-engravers settled in the city. But we find him also now in contact with another name which held a distinguished place in the literary annals of Basel. One of the earliest printers who had made the Basel presses known was Hans Amerbach. We have already seen that to be a printer in Basel meant something more than the mere craftsmanship of type-designing and of the handling of the printing ink, though that in itself, where the design of the type and the execution were both so excellent, assuredly gave the printers of the fifteenth century the title to rank as artists. But their position as publishers gave them a connection with letters in another sense, and it causes us no surprise to find that Bonifacius Amerbach, the friend of Holbein, of Froben, of Erasmus, of Jakob Meier, was a man of the highest education, and one who, in addition to his other attainments, was able in the year 1524 to accept the professorship of law at Basel. And it is to his appreciation of Flolbein in the early years of his career that we owe the preservation of nearly all which is left to tell us of the successive steps of his progress at Basel. He gathered together many examples of Holbein’s skill as a draughtsman, which else would doubtless have perished as so many others have perished. The Amerbach collection of Holbein’s works was purchased by the city of Basel in 1661, and formed the nucleus of that gallery which makes Basel a place of necessary pilgrimage to those who would understand Holbein. The portrait of Bonifacius Amerbach at the age of twenty-four, painted by Holbein in 1519, hangs now among the other oil paintings by him in that gallery. It is painted on a panel of no great size, but for largeness in the truest sense it could hardly be made bigger if it were painted on a six- foot canvas. Boniface Amerbach, whose name is spelt Amorbacchium in the inscription attached, probably because the writer of the lines, whom I suspect to have been Erasmus, thought it gave a more Latin turn to it, is shown to us as a brown-haired dark-eyed man of ruddy bronzed com¬ plexion, with clean-cut handsome features, and with a look of much thought upon the face. It answers, indeed, to one good, though not always infallible test of portraiture, since it not only convinces one as one looks at it, but remains with one when one is away from it. The face, indeed, seems to correspond well with what we know of Amerbach from other sources, a thoughtful, cultivated man of high character. It is, withal, of true German type. It would be difficult to mistake the nationality of the man if we were shown the portrait for the first time and knew nothing of his history. It would be equally difficult to escape the knowledge that we are looking at the portrait of a man of intellect and of refinement. 61 The colour of this portrait is wholly delightful, although it is not through its colour that it appeals in the first instance. Holbein throws the head against a sky of that transparent seagreen deepened into blue which so often appears in his early portraits. He does not, be it observed, attempt to fuse the head with the surrounding atmosphere; he uses his background rather to detach by strong but not inharmonious contrast the figure that is set against it. And this practice was but very slightly modified by him to the very last. Against this sky is seen a spray of brownish-green leaf, which leads the eye away a little from the rather large mass of black in the mantle, while it also serves to break the great space of bright colour behind. The highest colour note is, however, supplied by the vest which appears under the open mantle. It is of a rather pale turquoise colour, broken by the lights which fall upon the embroidered and quilted damask, Holbein has handled his various textures with consummate skill, and yet with that due sense of proportion which belonged from the first to this completely self-possessed artist. No Dutchman of them all who paints a silk or satin dress for the sake of the portrait of the dress renders texture with more entire understanding and dexterity than Holbein when he wishes. But Holbein uses his skill with a reticence. He wishes to tell you, to be sure, what manner of clothes the man or the woman wore whom he was painting, and how he or she looked in them, for that is an important part of their personality as those about them knew them in life. Therefore the garments shall be real, as real as he can make them, but the personality, the face, the hands, all in fact that makes permanent humanity, shall be real with a reality that shall make it as impossible for you to look at the clothes first and the humanity second, as it is for us, when we look at a beautiful woman beautifully dressed, to think of the dress first, and of her beauty afterwards, or not at all. It is three years since he painted Jakob Meier and his wife. Since then he has painted house-fronts, designed woodcuts, armour, plate, and here in this portrait of Amerbach he is with us again in precisely the same mood as when he came before us when he painted his first portrait, and as he will be when he paints for us his last. Indeed, it is very difficult to set down on paper any point of excellence in which this portrait is surpassed by any which he was afterwards to paint, unless it be that here we are made more conscious as we look at it of extreme care, while in such a portrait as the “ Sieur de Morette” we are conscious of nothing, until we force our¬ selves to become so, except that we are looking at a living being, a portrait that seems as it were to have come of itself. We may notice one technical point in this portrait of Amerbach which concerns itself with the mere quality of paint, but which is very character¬ istic of the artist in all his easel works, I mean the surface which he gives 62 to them. There is in all the genuine paintings of Holbein which have not been restored—the number is becoming annually smaller in an age when almost every great picture gallery keeps a salaried restorer—a certain trans¬ parent delicious quality of surface, something akin to the beautiful patina which one sometimes sees on an old Greek bronze, which Holbein evidently caressed and handled as tenderly and as lovingly as indeed, to go further with our comparison, any true collector would handle that same precious patina. Now this quality is as easily destroyed as the surface of a bronze, and it is equally impossible to give it back to either when it is once obscured or removed. A restored Holbein in which this wonderful surface has been turned to a slightly smoky texture is too often hardly a Holbein at all. Better by far the tokens of decay which still allow the superb qualities of the man’s technique to shine through it all than the restoration which gives you in reality some other man’s surface. The Amerbach portrait bears date, as we have seen, 1519. No im¬ portant easel painting can be traced to Holbein’s hand till the year 1521, when we find a work of the most striking character in the “ Christ in the Tomb” of the Basel Gallery. The painter was doubtless not without much employment meanwhile. We shall see presently that there is reason to suppose that numerous designs for glass paintings, of which a certain number survive, belong to the years between 1518 and 1521, and his work for the wood-engravers still continued. Probably, also, he was engaged in the decoration of houses in Basel. But the year 1520 is, so far as dated examples of his work are concerned, not a fruitful year. In 1521 came the commission for the painting of the town hall, which we have already dealt with in the preceding chapter. It was probably before that commis¬ sion was given that Holbein painted the “Christ in the Tomb,” which we are now to examine. Upon a long narrow panel Holbein has painted the body of a dead man lying upon his back, the face slightly turned over towards the spec¬ tator. Above it is the inscription, Jesus Nazarenus Rex Jud^orum. The Basel Gallery catalogue suggests that it once was an altar-piece in a church. If this suggestion is correct, it would seem further probable that it was one of those pictures which a year or two later than the date of its paint¬ ing were removed from the churches, ashort time before that iconoclastic out¬ break which destroyed nearly all the religious pictures remaining in Basel. It is difficult to convey to a reader who has not seen it, the effect which is produced upon the spectator who looks for the first time upon this appalling presentment of death. Holbein has painted from the deadhouse or from the hospital a study, exact in every detail, of one whose death had been violent, or in whom death had brought with it those after-consequences which make it painful, even terrible to look upon. No attendant circum- 63 stance of pain, even of coming decay, is omitted—one shrinks from their exact enumeration. It is a convincing, accurate, relentless study of the truth as he saw it in the model from which he painted it. Here there is no trace of the dignity of death ; none of that unearthly beauty which some¬ times transforms the face of those who could not claim in life what men call beauty; no majesty ; no mystery; not even the piteousness of death. All these feelings are obliterated—they become impossible—in the presence of the all-absorbing horror of this realization of mortality. It is a present¬ ment such as those who had loved best could least bear to look upon. All the sensations, love, pity, reverence, which it should be the first purpose of the picture to produce, are put to flight. We cannot see the Christ for the corruption. Now, if we assume that this was indeed Holbein’s conception ; that is to say, that having been asked to paint, or having determined to paint the dead Christ, he conceived the subject in this shape, and gave forth this as his imagined vision of the entombed Saviour, to be placed above an altar in a church, then we are driven to say that either his imagination, his power of conceiving a high ideal, was so tied down to mere naturalism that he could not rise above the most literal truths of poor mortality, and must realize his vision by a study from the charnel-house; or else we are driven to put into his mouth some such explanation for himself as this: Death, especially violent death, is often, or generally, an ugly, even a repulsive thing. A man who has died such a death is often terrible to behold. Christ died such a death. Therefore, since I know that a man who had died a violent death looked like this—for I saw such an one and painted such an one, and you take my word for it that it is like—I give this to you as my only realization of the dead Saviour. To accept either of these views is to contradict entirely what we know of Holbein from his own work of about this period. It is but one year to the time when he shall paint the “ Madonna of Solothurn,” a work which is neither lacking in imagination of a high order, nor yet of that refined vision by virtue of which the really great artist—the true Seer—is able to avert his eyes from all which is not needed to be seen. It is, again, no long time before, in his “ Dance of Death,” the work in which, above all others that we owe to him, his gift of imagination is most conspicuous, he shows him¬ self so little tied down by the chains of mere physical realism, and so com¬ pletely indifferent to mere naturalism as compared with the expression of an idea, that I am unable to find one instance out of that whole series in which the skeleton is correctly given. And if we are tempted to take the view that Holbein was in the “ Dead Christ” of Basel Gallery deliberately and of set purpose carrying out a preconceived principle by which physical facts should be facts even to the exclusion of higher facts, we have only to 64 look at the series of ten drawings from the “ Passion of Christ/’ destined for stained glass, which hang in the same gallery, and which were designed probably a little earlier, to see that in these Holbein has fully realized that the dignity and pathos of suffering are more potent elements of dramatic force than the mere physical symptoms of it. In short, I think that an explanation must be sought in a different direction. Holbein painted or began to paint this study without any con¬ ception in his mind at all. He had merely been painting a study from death which some chance had thrown in his way. He paints it as any artist should, as an exercise of his technical power, with all the fidelity of which he is capable, departing in no respect from the truth, however terrible, which he saw before him, improving nothing, omitting nothing, refining nothing. You have here, indeed, a glimpse of the means by which the artist reached his technical certainty of eye and hand. When it is finished, or possibly before it is finished, he allows himself to give it a title as a " Dead Christ,” and in so doing he did an injustice to his own instinct and to his own power as a great imaginative master. If it is asked how this could have come about, it must be remembered that in that day and in that country, in spite of its tendency to realism, there was no place for a mere rendering of physical fact as such, no toleration of a piece of painting for painting’s sake. Holbein could not hang his study of a dead man in some exhibition, as men have done often enough with studio models in modern salons and shows, with some such pseudo-title as “ Apr^s la Supplice” attached. The point of view of art in that day demanded a purpose, religious or classical, from every work of art. And Holbein allowed himself to supply, if one may use the expression, a posthumous religious title to what had been begun as an interesting artist’s exercise. I do not therefore think that we may call this work in evidence that Holbein was really carrying forward to its logical conclusion the principle which seems to have animated him in that early picture of “The Scourging,” of which we have spoken at length in an earlier chapter. Its value and its interest lie rather in the light which it throws on the thoroughness of Holbein’s practice, on the assured progress of his technique, and on the uncompromising manner in which he faced and overcame all difficulties connected with the rendering of natural fact according to its natural appearance. As a religious conception I do not believe that Holbein himself in his later years would have consented to be judged by this work. It may be convenient at this point to allude to a picture in the Basel Gallery, the “ Passion of Christ” in eight subjects painted in oil upon four long narrow upright panels united in one frame.^ The Basel Gallery Cata- ' This picture must on no account be confused with the “ Passion ” of Christ on ten separate 65 K logue attributes them to the year 1521, first half. Their authenticity has long been a battle-ground for critics, and it is long likely to remain so. The picture was originally in possession of the Rathaus, and in the year 177^ the council of Basel decreed its presentation to the public library of the town, causing it, however, to be restored before its transfer by the artist Grooth, The amount of cleaning and “retouching”—ominous word which that artist employed is a very important factor in the decision of whether these eight subjects are the work of Holbein or not. It is evident that up to the period of their “retouching” and transfer no doubt had been entertained as to their authenticity, and it is further clear that they then enjoyed a reputation which has been somewhat undermined since that date. The first who challenged their attribution was Rumohr, and he has been followed by Wornum and Mantz, and lastly by Mr. F. G. Stephens, who, in a valu¬ able trio of articles on Holbein in the “ Portfolio ’ volume of 1883, declares himself unable to accept them as the work of Holbein, but prefers to con¬ sider them the work of an unknown artist of Basel, though of no less power than Holbein himself. On the other side, that is to say in favour of the old attribution, we find amongst others Woltmann, who goes so far as to pronounce the somewhat sweeping verdict that whosoever does not see in them the work of Holbein had better declare that Holbein never existed. I must confess myself unable to see the logical necessity of this. But I do recognize the value of a remark which Woltmann makes, that it is easier to recognize them as the work of Holbein if they are viewed through photographs than when one stands in front of the picture itself. I had myself experienced this same result, and I am inclined to think that that fact presents us with the key to the situation. I believe that we are looking at a design by Holbein, once a very great one, which has been so entirely repainted, “retouched,” by a painter of the eighteenth century that Holbein's design lies buried beneath a changed colouring and a different technique. And the view, therefore, that we are not looking at Holbein’s technique is probably quite correct. But I find it very difficult to think of another painter to whom we could owe these designs. The restorer has indeed been so far faithful to the drawing that he has kept his colour within the old boundaries, though he has given false emphasis by means of it to portions of the work which in all probability the original designer did not emphasize. But through it all there comes to us, as we look at this picture and try to disengage our vision from the distracting and painful discordances of shot yellows and pinks—of the types beloved by the late Roman school—crude blues and greens and harsh reds, a sense of dignity in the composition of many of these subjects which makes us ask whom can we think of beyond sheets of paper in the same gallery, forming designs for stained glass, to which reference has already been made, and with which a later chapter will have to deal more fully. 66 Holbein himself who would have done these things quite in this manner, with this largeness of expression on a very small scale, and with this dramatic unity. The scene of the Mocking of Christ, in the lower left-hand corner, is as a piece of evidence of its authorship that which carries with it the most weight. Conviction is hardly possible where the evidence has been so obscured, but while I wholly agree with Wornum and Mr. Stephens that on the grounds of technique we could not, as we see the picture, assign it to Holbein, I find it equally difficult to reject it as a design originally by Holbein and painted over by a later artist. 67 CHAPTER VIII DESIGNS FOR GLASS I N the chapter of this book which dealt with Holbein’s youth at Augs¬ burg I pointed out what opportunities that city offered to one of his tastes for becoming acquainted with the practical needs of many kinds of handicrafts. The training which he had received there by constant and unavoidable association with the craftsmen who were his fellows bore immediate fruit when his independent life as an artist opened out for him at Basel. The title of craftsman we are not able to claim for him, for though he designed freely for many crafts, we are not able to prove in any instance that he practised the craft himself. He drew numerous designs on wood for the engravers, but we cannot absolutely prove, however prob¬ able we may think it, that he ever cut a block, though to a man of his trained capacities, who thoroughly understood the requirements and the limitations of the art, it would be no great task to achieve the simpler technics of that craft: he drew many designs for painted windows, but we have no means of knowing whether he ever actually executed a painting on glass,^ though it is likely enough that he did so: he designed cups for goldsmiths, which John of Antwerp and other craftsmen should carry out: jewellery for other hands to fashion: swords and daggers for the armourer to forge and chisel: and covers for the bookbinder. A designer for the crafts, therefore, rather than himself a craftsman, so far as we are able to speak from the evidence which we possess. The artist who designs for any handicraft compels us to examine his designs not merely from the point of view of their intrinsic beauty, dignity, worthiness, when we look at them as expressions of an idea, but also from the point of view of their application to the needs and limitations of the particular handicraft to which they will be intrusted, and through which they will be translated into that final language in which they will have to speak to men. No dignity of design is of any avail if it is to be lost eventually through the incapacity of the particular craft to express it fully. ' I believe that I am right in saying that no piece of painted glass which can be assigned with certainty to Holbein is known to exist. But his manner may be found very frequently in subsequent examples of German painted glass of the sixteenth century, and exercised no small influence in Southern Germany. 68 CHRIST FIXED TO THE CROSS. DESIGN FOR GLASS BASEI. ■ fT^ fisi- >'11 karaife’' \^\ tlsowgi V instaAf^! on rn^)f. bf l^>raift., 'v '» able a irali ;fc tfes*M4uji«>.jr^,f(i|- .-v; ev^C cut > !adc«! ■^alirPtfSEU %ja^ 4 t "fr* ;r.^ ^ tjrVu cnA4 M-- • *■ ' ■ Jfe ' '*^ » |j£= Ts^ '-"*' aBAjo H04 4oie3u .aao^'j sht or using tkishd :aa a .-y- ;i‘ J 9 ua The suitability of the design to the exact needs of the material, to the exact possibilities of the craft, is of primary importance. There are at Basel some twenty-five designs, which are recognized in the catalogue as designs for painted glass. To these I should myself feel somewhat inclined to add the six costume sketches, although the absence of an architectural framework around them may argue against that view. The designs include the figures of saints, religious scenes, coats of arms, and the insignia of towns, such as Basel itself. In all cases where the purpose is undeniable they are treated as opaque pictures to be painted on glass, and they are placed in architectural settings which act as a framework to separate them from the colourless glass in which, according to the German fashion of the day, they were to be set as panels. These designs were, it must be carefully observed, to be carried out as painted glass. And here it becomes necessary to emphasize the distinction between painted glass and stained glass. In stained glass, such as we see for instance in the splendid thirteenth-century examples of Chartres, Le Mans, and other French cathedrals, where the windows are in such perfect harmony with the architecture as to seem to form a part of it, the design is a mosaic of pieces of translucent glass previously coloured by the fusion of metallic oxides under great heat, so that the colour is actually incorpor¬ ated in the substance of the glass. Though figures are used and subjects represented there is no attempt at the making of a picture, but on the con¬ trary a perfectly frank acceptance of the limitations which the use of patches of stained glass obviously imposes. There can be no question of making a picture out of a material whose first and finest quality is that it lets the light shine through it from outside, the full beauty of the material depend¬ ing entirely upon its translucency. For it is a fact which hardly needs stating that a solid body, as, for instance, a human figure or a stone build¬ ing, does not allow light to shine through it, but on the contrary blocks the passage of light, and the endeavour to represent such a body in a natural manner and with full pictorial reality, with all the modelling through light and shade proper only to an opaque object, is evidently to try and reconcile two wholly contradictory conventions. The earlier stained- glass workers, unconsciously perhaps, but completely, recognized the limi¬ tations which the use of translucent material imposed, while they also recognized the splendid decorative effects which it offered to them so long as they consented to these limitations. They employ therefore the human figure, and natural objects, rather as splendid symbols, sometimes merely as splendid patterns within whose lines they may confine the translucent patches of their stained glass without any pretence of offering the eye and the mind a real presentment of a natural object. There is neither modelling nor pictorial method. A patch of uniform crimson glass shaped within the 69 leads shall stand for a mantle; a similar patch of purple for a robe; and the light which shall give the highest glory to both colours shall be allowed to pass freely through. This is stained glass, as the early craftsmen of France and of Germany employed it, and not painted glass. Painted glass, on the other hand, consists of painting the design, pattern, or picture, with vitrifiable or enamel colours on to glass, either plain or previously stained, which being once more fused under heat so locks up the vitrified colours with the substance of the glass that they become one with it, and the pattern or picture is permanently fixed in more or less opaque colours on a previously translucent ground. This fashion, commencing with the mere indication of lines for the divisions of the features or the folds of a robe, had gradually developed into the system by which the painting had become a pictorial representation. The glass, in fact, whether stained or unstained, became as it were the canvas on which an opaque or semi-opaque figure should be painted. And in Germany, in the sixteenth century, this method of dealing with glass had gone so far that the earlier tradition had almost died out, and a complete pictorial representa¬ tion had begun to be the aim of the glass-painter—an aim which, however, it was left to the nineteenth century to carry to its extreme point in that type of painted glass which is often known as Munich glass. It is obvious that in thus trying to make a transparent substance yield a result which an opaque or solid substance is alone fitted to yield, the pictorial glass-painters of the sixteenth century and their successors were employing a compromise between two conflicting aims in art, and with the result that invariably follows such compromises. They lost the translucent splendour of the material as it appears in the handicraft of the older workers, and they did not obtain a truly pictorial result in exchange. They sinned against their material, and one may be sure that in art as in other things the sin will find us out. It has been necessary to say thus much, lest in presently praising the designs of Holbein for painted glass, I should seem to be acquiescing in the false principle which had been adopted by the German glass-painters of the sixteenth century, and which was destined with later developments to lead to the degradation and extinction of the art. But the guilt of this misuse of the material must not be laid at Holbein’s door. He had not suddenly broken with the sound traditions which had kept a noble but narrowly conventional art within its true lines. He found those conven¬ tions already broken, and the art far gone on the wrong road. He had to take the art as he found it. Even an artist of the truest instincts cannot live back into a previous age, he can only make great the art of his age as he finds it. And it is no reproach to Holbein that in preparing his designs for painted glass he took up the art in the exact stage in which he found 70 THE CRUCIFIXION. DESIGN FOR GLASS BASEL it wa:^_1«jrj to the airtetscitth cenWty te tA?f y J of paiatisd gfa^t wiii^'is oftaft knoim as ' f*br\* thu« tr>'«ag' tif iHakr. a toumforsn; f»;f!a>iJi^nc«ri* ^&h»a#!ts .Jfs-Mt?#?. >«4s«nr# «r»' *^ii5 ia ^ virtai»^=^(jf fjkfOfiM rts^ ]&*<'»' -. a>a«^^_iui4:di^ w.'t^'Ufe «i« ihia'i,^ m J ^ find w^oat" H has been i^c*<^-»rj » Saj- -♦d “ ' irf HoSb^alii Iwj^oM gU ' * Jiad'ljee* Shktkfi . , if ■•)^?^*. ^' . -teSw. 'Ste jfcT ^ «■-*.> '-^ it*. * • 'S • “* ^ • .f * - . Jii>« ii^ll be 4 ;.fc -1 4 #.f ij X? •:«V, i. for (jaii>ts 4 )(^'« M f-*;^ ^ >•. liftA-ji asAjo son sioiaaa ItbixiHiDuab anT ■. 7 *-■■ 5 aJMAa it, and treated his material as it was being universally treated in Germany at that time. He did, we need not waste time in either questioning the point or defending the position, regard painted glass as a means of expressing incident in much the same way as he would have expressed it on a painted panel or in a woodcut, merely keeping his designs simple enough and broad enough between the lines to prevent his window, or his glass panel, from darkening instead of lightening the chamber. He makes the design tell a story, express the most intense pathos, emphasize dramatic action, and in fact do all that a cartoon or a picture may be asked to do. The decorative use of the material is made secondary to this, it has to grow out of it or accompany it if it can. If it does not or cannot, at any rate the design, the expression through the drawing and the treatment, shall be there. That is what Holbein aimed at, and disapprove as we may we have to accept it from him, and see whether, with that as his aim, he can be seen, by the aid of his surviving designs, to have failed or to have succeeded.^ And, keeping in mind that this was his primary object, we shall be able to form a judgement as to how far he accomplished it by an examina¬ tion of the designs on paper which he left behind him. There are some twenty-seven drawings in the Basel Museum, carried out very broadly and simply in Indian ink, reinforced with a reed pen, seven in the British Museum,^ and others in smaller numbers in the cabinets of European galleries. It can hardly be profitable to enumerate the various subjects of these designs. I have already said that they include designs for armorial bearings, separate or combined figures—one fine set consists of a Virgin and Child and seven saints, eight subjects in all; but by far the finest set, and that which it will best repay us to examine, as typical of the artist’s work for the glass-painter, is the series of ten separate subjects from the “ Passion of Christ” in the Basel Museum. It will be convenient to enumerate them. 1. 2 . 3- 4- 5- 6 . (Catalogue number 31). Christ before Caiaphas. .. (32). The Scourging. „ (33)- The Mocking. ,, ,, (34). The Crown of Thorns. „ „ {35). Ecce Homo. ,, ,, (36). The Handwashing of Pilate. ' In the church of St. Theodor at Basel is a window which was executed after one of Holbein’s designs in this series. ^ The reader is recommended to study the Passion series in the British Museum Print Room. They are, however, less fine than the designs for the same subjects in the Basel Museum, being weaker in outline and woollier in texture. And this, coupled with the fact that they are reversed from the Basel Passion series, gives the impression that they were in the first place “off- tracks ” obtained by pressure from the Basel series and strengthened with pen and with washes. 71 7- (Catalogue number 37). The Bearing of the Cross. 8. „ „ (38). The Stripping off of the Robe. 9. „ „ (39). The Fixing to the Cross. 10. „ „ (40). The Crucifixion. It has been suggested that these designs were intended to be executed on a very large scale in painted glass. Several considerations seem to me to negative this idea. The ten designs are rectangular and upright, the proportion of height to breadth being as five to three and a half. And if we imagine the design enlarged to, perhaps, ten feet by seven, we have to imagine a large rectangular window space to take it in. And it is difficult to believe in the possibility of supporting such an area of glass without bars of a very substantial description. But a careful examination of the designs will show that they are quite unfit for being divided vertically by mullions. Such a division would cut the design to pieces in such a manner as entirely to destroy the breadth and unity which is one of their finest characteristics. It is indeed true that frequently painted glass windows, as, for example, the great series of King’s College Chapel at Cambridge, which are treated in the pictorial style of the sixteenth century, are divided by the vertical mullions, but if an experiment be made with these designs of Holbein by cutting a very narrow bar of paper, and passing it vertically upon them, the reader will find that there is hardly one of them in which such a division becomes possible without destruction to the design. Again, if the reader will hold a reproduction before him, and mentally enlarge it to ten feet by seven, he will find that such an enlargement would at once produce great emptiness in the upper portions, the spaces thus produced becoming very large. The general style of the designs seems to me rather to point to their having been intended for glass panels of no great size, made to be inserted into larger windows of plain glass, to be seen at no great height above the eye. This method was at the time much favoured in Germany, and examples of it will occur to every reader who is familiar with the public buildings of that date or with the national museums of the country. The fact that in each case the design is inclosed in an architectural framework favours the idea that they were intended as panels, the framework serving to separate the glass picture from the adjoining colourless glass. Viewed merely as drawings, and omitting any further reference to their destination as applied art, they are perhaps more impressive than anything which Holbein has left us until we come presently to the " Dance of Death. They do not yield their full impression, indeed, to the casual glance nor to a full-speed inspection. They do not captivate the eye in the same way that the drawings of many another master hung upon a wall will do. On the contrary, they have in them that which rather impels the visitor to galleries who asks to be enticed to look at a picture by beauty of line 72 :r> .-i- rr^ .. V •//"' at ”.-fr '&:• -:■^‘v 'C^ S: -K >< I . :^t3c puxorfid 9iy^M:'^)iiii^ft>.'T^^KSssb^^ I W ■•* '• • •• va 'U •*' >r- - y 5 ^ e < V • 4 ?fcd ^ V'«v-- ' ■■' . »* ' . -. 1 • *'• T 'j* - m: ^Jjsr* , - jrt'-’ ■ .'v •■ T ' •. .-.liywr**’. .•- •• 1^ •,?■•* r • • '«fc'■ - - . .,4:- > ” wm — I to \l 4- ^■> -!'.'j^r' '-1 ■ 4 -'v r- 1^- f V « -y. i;; _, P ' ' S •- i*f Ji* , /‘S 4 - 1 -. * • . i ' 1 # >• ; 4®!; I <£f Ay '••j rf^ V; - * * 1^* • 'W\ Wv -■ ' •^'(> Il.,3-. ki i ' *’=(!.> < k • •••.* '“-.r or conspicuous grace in the figures to pass on to more attractive work. They have in them certain qualities which impress and continue to impress the mind after the eye has ceased to retain the exact record of their lines. In this series of Passion pictures Holbein has never forgotten the gravity, the dignity, the pathos of the theme of the Divine sorrow. He never allows the force of his conception to be weakened by the introduction of any motive which is merely graceful or pleasing. You are not asked to pause in the unfolding of the Great Drama as it comes before you incident by incident in order that you may admire the pose of some figure, the graceful line of some drapery, the consciously fine anatomy of some of the actors. Mere beauty for its own sake must not be there: it may be there if it grows out of the true telling of the tale according to his vision of it. And equally he will not now, whatever he did a few years ago, allow his mind to be checked in the contemplation of this stately sorrow that it may dwell upon some minor detail of truth, or even upon some major detail of truth if that detail asserts itself to the injury of the leading theme. The more one examines this series of designs the more does their impression grow and deepen. In an earlier chapter we were led to consider the attitude of the young painter’s mind when he painted that earliest rendering of the “Scourging of Christ” at Basel (1516). A comparison of that work with his rendering of the same subject in this smaller series of drawings will show that in the course of these few years Holbein’s instinct had matured and developed in a very notable degree. The sense of proportion in the values of the various facts which a man’s art has to deal with, the sense of relationship between the various truths which it has to present—facts and truths some of them subjective and some of them objective—is rarely the first sense which is fully developed in a young artist, even in one who is destined to become great Insistence on some special set of facts seen from some individual standpoint, the aiming at some special phase of truth, either in technique, or in manner of seeing, or of imagining, is nearly always the first manifesta¬ tion of individuality even in the greatest of men. And in Holbein’s earliest rendering of the Passion of Christ we saw the tendency to insist on truths, physical truths, which carried out to their utmost literalness do in effect drive back the mind, not only from the attitude in which it can look upon those facts with calmness, but also from the attitude from which it can contemplate the more important facts. In the first picture of the “Scourging” it is the brutality, the ferocity of the deed on the part of the doers which forces itself upon us. Turn to the rendering of the same scene in this later, though not much later series, and we shall find that, though we are still conscious of the cruelty of the deed, the feeling which has now come uppermost, that is to say, if we are reading the series as a series, for one must make that a con¬ dition of its true interpretation, is that of the pathos and the dignity of the 73 L suffering. There is in this true realism, as there always is in everything which Holbein does, but it is kept in due subordination to the great story which he has to tell. Still, we shall observe, therefore, the telling of the story is his aim as it was before, but he sees that his story must be told differently now lest those who hear it should carry away, as they are apt to do when a story is told with wrong emphasis, the memory of some sensational detail rather than the main purport of its telling. We are able to see, because the mind is no longer agitated by the obtrusion of ghastly incident, what it was and what it meant. And while he thus preserves the unity of the great thought which animates the whole series of designs Holbein does not throw away any minor truth which is needed for the complete telling of history. For example, in the “Affixing to the Cross,” he has drawn in the foreground a blacksmith’s box with all the tools distinctly stated, and yet not so forc¬ ing themselves upon the eye as to draw away our attention from the great central action of the scene. One man is engaged in boring a hole in the wood. He does it with the simple movement which is natural to the action. He is no longer the violent, angular, obtrusive being whom the earlier Ger¬ mans would have given us. His businesslike indifference, the indifference of one who has had the same thing to do in many similar scenes and to whom Christ was no more than any other, is infinitely more telling, even as a piece of callous brutality, and interferes less with what we want to think about than the older presentment, such even as Holbein himself might have given us but a few years earlier. And it is this union of true German motives, sincerity, thoroughness, plainness of speech, with the genius of the man himself that makes these designs typical of the Holbein whom we know. In our first chapter we saw how the very palpable defects of the German school had grown out of their virtues, and how the lack of a due sense of proportion, the absence of the refining and controlling spirit of the really inspired artist, had hitherto produced results which were so often nearly great and yet fell short of absolute greatness. The key to the understanding of Holbein lies in the fact that, while he retained the virtues of the school and was never other than German even to the end of his English days, yet he outlived, and that at a very early period of his career, all the defects and the exaggerations which had clung to that school and limited its achievements, adding to those same virtues just that touch of genius which, Midas- like, turns everything which it handles to gold. He seemed to have been sent amongst his own people, like Saul, to be a head and shoulders taller than any one of them, and yet to be still one of them. No one who possesses a good knowledge of the characteristics which mark the art of nations could fail, if he saw these drawings for the first time, at once to 74 DESIGN FOR THE ORGAN WINGS OF THE MINSTER BASEL 3in HO 'eDv.m MAOiiO hht so-t ;cdi& 3 o assign them to the German school, nor could he hesitate long before he added to them the right name, so entirely do they carry the impress both of the nation and of the man. We have already said that the same gallery contains some seventeen more designs for glass. A Virgin and Child, with a kneeling figure at the foot, is one of the finest of these. Amongst the armorial bearings and purely decorative pieces none is more elaborate and more fully made out than the well-known and frequently reproduced drawing in the print room at Berlin, in which a pair of Landsknechte act as the supporters to a shield, on which no bearings have, however, been added by Holbein. There are slight indications of colour on this drawing. It is probable that the greater number of these designs for glass were made to be carried out in that mix¬ ture of pale yellow and grisaille which is so often found on German glass of the period, the more brilliant hues being used sparingly for dresses and for the salient points of the costumes or the shields. The architectural details were probably carried out in pale yellow for the clear portions and grisaille for the shadows. These drawings appear to belong for the most part to the first six years of Holbein’s sojourn at Basel. One bears the date 1518, and was therefore probably drawn at Lucerne; another has the date 1520, and must therefore have been done after his return to Basel. It is important to draw attention to a peculiarity which makes itself felt in these drawings, and which is also to be observed in other early work by Holbein, namely, the shortness of the figures. This is especially noticeable in the design of St. Barbara, in which the lower portion of the dress seems to be cut off by the straight line of the steps on which she stands. But in this case at least the appearance of shortness is not entirely due to mere preference, conscious or unconscious, for a type. The figure is drawn to be seen from below—as in the case of the organ wings for Basel Minster, presently to be described— and Holbein deliberately employs one of his favourite perspective effects. He represents the figure as if standing on a fiat ledge or step. And a living figure or a sculptured figure so seen from below would be practically hidden in the lower part by the projection of the step acting as a line in front of it. I am not concerned at this moment to discuss the question of whether Holbein did rightly in thus introducing into what should be a transparent piece of conventional decoration an appearance which could only be observed in figures modelled in relief. But that he did so will be realized by the spectator if he will place himself directly under the figure and look up. The same intention is found in the very fine sketch which he made for the organ wings of Basel Minster. The finished works, painted in mono¬ chrome and of great size, were amongst the few pictures which escaped the fury of the iconoclastic outbreak in 1527, and they are now to be seen in 75 an adjoining room of Basel Museum. The sketch, at any rate as we view the two works in their present position, is preferable to the large finished wings. The figures are so represented that when they were looked at from down below they should suggest that part of the robe and of the feet were invisible through the projection of the ledge on which they stand. It is impossible to acquit Holbein here of an error in artistic judgement when he allows himself thus to introduce into the decoration of a flat surface the mere imitation of an effect which might be produced if the figures had been modelled in the solid, but which even in that case would have been avoided if possible by a sculptor. But if we set that consideration aside we must acknowledge that few finer or more dignified figures came from Holbein’s hand. To about the year 1521 I should be inclined to attribute a very im¬ portant work in monochrome which is to be found in Basel Gallery—the store house from which we have to draw nearly all the examples which illustrate the early work of our painter. It represents in two panels of no great size the Man of Sorrows and the Mater Dolorosa. It is not possible to decide the exact purpose for which these two panels were painted, but they give the impression of having been preliminary designs for larger works, possibly for the wings of an altar-piece, to which Holbein from pure love of the work gave an unusual degree of finish. There is one indication only of colour, namely, the blue sky seen through the arches. There is nothing else in the picture which suggests that Holbein had intended to complete them in colour.^ The Renaissance architecture is treated with the most loving care and the most masterly understanding, and the pictures in this respect remain to us one of the highest examples of Holbein’s crafts¬ manship. The setting of the piece is indeed of faultless technique, the work of one to whom the planning of such ornament is not only not laborious, but an expression of spontaneous exuberant delight, in which the spectator is compelled to share, and from which he cannot withhold his sympathy even if his face be set as firmly against the style as that of Ruskin himself. But it is to none of these things that the pictures owe their place among the great designs of Holbein. The figure of Christ in the Man of Sorrows has for its expressiveness of its great theme few equals in Art. Once more the point of view is essentially Holbein's. He gives us the figure of one whose visage was marred more than any man’s, who when we shall see Him has no beauty that we shall desire Him, .the old Byzantine conception translated into the more intensely human sympathies of the German Renaissance. The moment chosen is that which immediately succeeds the crowning with thorns. The crown of thorns is still upon His brow, the * See ail important observation, however, on this point on page 124, on Holbein’s technical methods. 76 BASEL » r ihc iv» ^ x^\'^.ik;» P :' 4 >-=? 4 .'- 4 ^-* ^<> -: li *-:%•* K>*.-••' 1 ■ ^■- Tj’akvH '. . »af S-yT^Nvs So dRaSc' tlw t\jr:‘ ; ilfp-5SC for 'f |t?t (‘ ■ ■.■-■•;._•■ , ♦ . • yi -V 'V^'l - -i^.A -.-v-' ■ - ^aait|||^l^}». Tfv >. < tc i-’iv...-''-' ;W-' tn of Merf to 5 h;ire, .i^i) if. ... * . 1 , 4 , ca«U): /.20^0J0a ilHTAM CJVIA OMOH 3D0H j»%Aa royal robe stripped from the body and lying partly beneath the feet. The utter loneliness of the grief-stricken figure is enhanced by the gorgeous architecture amidst which the King of the Jews sits enthroned. It was not for mere technical display, not from mere delight in the designing of adornment that Holbein set that pathetic figure deserted of all men in the surroundings of a palace. In the other panel, the Virgin as the Mater Dolorosa is set in the midst of similar surroundings. She kneels, her head turned towards the right, her hands raised as if by the involuntary action of the old motherly instinct. The motive, indeed, of the figure hardly appeals to us at first till Holbein’s intention has come home to us. It is as if she had seen in a vision the figure of her son in his stricken solitude, she too in her solitude. And she turns her face sorrowfully towards him, her arms of their own accord shaping themselves to the instinctive mother’s action as if she would take him in them once more as she used once to do. It is a very quiet sorrow this—Northern sorrow expressed with none of the external signs of emotion—not of that effusive gesture which belong as properly and as sincerely to the sorrow of the south. Contrast it, for example, with the Virginia that “Entombment” by Gian Bellini in his earlier days which hangs in the Brera. If such a picture had been painted in the north we should accuse the sorrow of being theatrical, exaggerated, whereas it is quite a sincere picture of the signs by which sorrow displays itself in the south. With equal truth to nature Holbein draws the restrained, intensely felt, but little expressed grief of the impassive north. The face is a homely face, on which weeping and watching have left their trace. It is not beautiful, but just the face which might belong to any German mother, and so painted by Holbein with a full purpose. I have even thought that I could trace in the face, through the portrait which his father left at Augsburg, some like¬ ness to his own mother as he remembered her, perhaps, in the later days of her adversity. Of two panels which are preserved, after many wanderings, in the Cathedral of Freiburg im Bresgau, and which represent the Nativity and the Adoration of the Magi, it is only necessary to say that they seem to belong to the earliest years at Basel, and that the Nativity contains the same motive, namely, the light proceeding from the cradle of the infant and irradiating the scene around, which other artists used, and most notably of course Correggio in his picture known as “La Notte” at Dresden. It may be doubted, however, whether the motive originated with Holbein. 77 CHAPTER IX THE SOLOTHURN MADONNA—THE DARMSTADT MADONNA T he moment when Hans Holbein and his brother Ambros had entered Basel was not the most favourable for one at least of the pair, whom destiny seemed to have marked by peculiar gifts to become one of the greatest as well as one of the most original and independent of religious painters. In 1515, indeed, men were still musing, and the fire had not yet burned. Religious feeling was strong, but not as yet fierce enough or bitter enough in Basel to create that division into two camps which was to follow at a surprisingly short interval. Before the year 1520 had ended the two parties had so far formulated their views, and so far chosen their watchwords, that, as we have seen, local politics were strongly tinged with religious animosities. It was just after that date that Jakob Meier, who had served as burgomaster for several years, and was the recognized leader of the old Catholic party in the council, was expelled from office. The charge on which he suffered expulsion had no directly apparent connection with religion. It referred to the question of his having accepted illegal rewards for services rendered to the King of France, but his disgrace appears to have been regarded as a triumph to the Protestant party in the council, and that fact is significant of the growth of that bitterness which was to end not many years later in the shedding of blood in the streets. The question concerns us here only as it affected the art of Hans Holbein. The growth of the reformed views had in the first instance brought reproach upon pictures in churches and elsewhere which had been used for superstitious purposes. Thence the feeling spread to those which, if they could not be so far accused, yet by nature of their subject linked themselves closely to those which had so been used. And in this list were included all pictures which represented the Madonna and the saints. Before long the feeling extended itself in the form of a general suspicion to all religious pictures. And because art at that period claimed for itself practically but three fields of action, religious subjects and classical subjects and portraiture—since landscape painting and genre painting were scarcely yet existent, even in embryo—it followed that the check to religious painting which resulted from the condition of religious feeling during those few years was for the time being a paralysis of art. For the discouragement which fell upon religious art spread itself by some connection of ideas, which it is more easy to under- 78 stand than to define, to all art whatever. Nor was the injury to art due alone to the direct action of this religious suspicion which had fallen upon its chief development. Indirectly also the result of the impending religious struggle made itself felt. Men do not stop to admire the beauties of nature as they are going into battle, neither do men’s minds pause to take in pictures when they are on the eve of some great religious and social upheaval. The greatness of the stake which was evidently at issue, nothing less indeed than the religion of all Europe, absorbed all other interests. To enjoy art, as to enjoy poetry or music, needs a free and a happy mind. And there is direct evidence that in Basel at least the lesser artists were beginning to feel great distress. Holbein indeed survived, but, as Iselin put it, he had “ to drink his wine from the tap.” That is to say, that although his superiority to all the other artists of the place, coupled with his well-established position as a book illustrator, kept his head above water, he did not reach any condition of affluence. Commissions of all kinds were now scarce, and becoming every day scarcer as the great moment of religious conflict drew nearer. Com¬ missions for religious pictures had for the reasons already given almost ceased to be known. When, in the year 1526, Holbein left Basel for England—“to try to scrape together a few angels,” says Erasmus—he had practically bidden farewell to great religious art. Fate had decreed that by that new departure of his he was to display himself in a series of portraits which for many of their qualities have no rivals in the whole realm of art as it is known to us, yet he had, by no choice of his own, but through the ruling of necessity, closed the door behind him upon one branch of his art in which, if he had found opportunity to have followed it further, he might have stood almost alone amongst men who have ever painted. The two great Madonnas of Holbein, known to us as the Madonnas of Solothurn and of Darmstadt, from their present resting-places, stand by themselves as the evidences of Holbein’s power to touch that one subject which can never grow old, but which can never be new, with an individuality and impressiveness which does somehow make those two pictures as we look at them a new treatment and a new revelation of a theme which had seemed by Holbein’s day almost to have exhausted as surely as it had revealed the resources of all the schools and of all the painters. It is the theme in which the highest triumphs had been achieved by the greatest men, and the theme in which the lesser men had most revealed themselves. A theme, moreover, in which the test of success is most readily applied, since so long as the world lasts and motherhood is motherhood, every wholesome human being has in himself the power, not indeed to judge of a picture as a work of art, nor to gauge its success by any of those rules of art of which he may be wholly ignorant, but of estimating whether the vision of true and pure womanhood which the painter has sought to present awakes in him who sees it a corre- 79 spending ideal. On that point the appeal is to the crowd at large, and there is no carrying the case further to any court of artists or of critics. The painter who essays this subject cannot bid any man, as Apelles bade the cobbler, to stick to his last. The circle of criticism here—in all save that which is purely technical or artistic—embraces no less than the entire census of our common humanity. The “ Madonna of Solothurn” owes its title to the fact that in the middle of the last century it came to light in the church of the village of Renchen near that town. Since that time it remained in private hands till the day of its transfer to the town gallery of Solothurn. Its condition at the time of its discovery seems to have been very bad. The panel on which it was painted was wormeaten and decayed, and the painting had to be trans¬ ferred to a fresh panel, always a more risky task than the transfer of a picture painted upon canvas. Then followed the terrible necessity of a “complete restoration.” Dr. Woltmann tells us that he saw the picture after its transfer to its new panel, but unhappily he gives no details of the exact damage which it had suffered, nor does he give us just the very facts which he might at that time have been able to preserve, of the exact changes which it under¬ went through its complete restoration. He merely tells us that he judges from photographs that the restoration was quite satisfactory. But unhappily the term “quite satisfactory” as applied to the restorations of pictures does not carry conviction. Dr. Woltmann mentions the fact that one authority stated that the face had undergone “ restoration,” but no one who knows the ordinary process of decay in neglected panel pictures will for a moment suppose that the wreckage had confined itself to the face of the Madonna. There can be no doubt that the picture had suffered heavily from the ravages of time, whatever it mayor may not have suffered at the hands of the restorer. But our gratitude for the recovery of such a masterpiece, even if something has gone from us which we would willingly have kept, may well make us forget all sense of loss in the joy of possession. Whatever has been lost to us of the original surface, whatever has been obscured from us in the inevitable injuries of restoration, we have at least preserved to us the design of Holbein, and that a most noble one. The “Solothurn Madonna” bears the date of 1522. We have absolutely no record, great or small, documentary or accidental, of its existence up to the very hour of its discovery in the last century. It has been suggested that it must have been originally painted for the chapel in the Minster of Solothurn. If that conjecture be right, then one would follow it up by the further suggestion that it may have been one of those paintings which was removed from its position in the minster just before the ruin fell upon so many pictures in the great outbreak. One may suppose that it may have been set aside in some lumber room, and at a later period passed on by sale 80 4 or gift to the obscurity of the village church. But another history suggests itself to me as probable, though hardly so probable as the older view. It may, like the “Meier Madonna,” have been the commission of a Catholic devotee, and as such may have remained, like that masterpiece, in private possession, and so escaped the storm. Whatever be the true account, it is certain that it wholly escaped knowledge or recognition for over three hundred years. The reader will, if he has read the preface of this book and followed its plan, have already understood that it is no part of its scheme to take picture by picture, and exhaust the patience of the reader and the type of the com¬ positor in the description of minutiae, except where it is necessary to the understanding of motive or of technique to emphasize such points. Where a reproduction is given, the reader can inform himself as to the pose of a figure, the attitude of an arm, the position of a flag. Where no such repro¬ duction is given, and where the picture is not known to the reader, I do not believe that such details very often convey much impression. I shall effect my purpose better if I ask the reader to give thoughtful study to the reproductions, always reserving the admission that no reproduction can be entirely satisfactory or explanatory. I shall have effected it best of all if I can send him to obtain his inspiration before the originals themselves, there perhaps to disagree with me, but not, assuredly, with Holbein. Conversely, wherever such details are employed in the course of this book, I will ask that it shall be understood that they are emphasized because they are either important to the understanding of the picture in question, or because they will sooner or later be needed again, or have distinct connection with some other work from the artist’s hands, and not because I believe it necessary in a book of this description to spend time in describing the exact fashion of the coronet of the Madonna, the exact position of the arm in the figure of the Child, the exact angle at which a saint holds his flag, or the exact number of the figures who may kneel at His feet. The two saints who stand to left and right of this picture are St. Martin, Bishop of Tours, and St. Ursus, the warrior, fit patron saint for Solothurn,^ whose armourers and swordmakers had made the city famous. It is not, therefore, without reason that Holbein paints for the eyes of the men of Solothurn a soldier in full armour, a splendid manly figure such as they had seen in their streets, and such as wore armour that their own hands had forged. It is a true and very noble, but very simple and scarcely idealized, though finely selected, type of the soldier Swiss or soldier German of the day, done into plain language, to be sure, so that all who passed might read, and yet expressing, as plain language in the hands of a great poet can be made to do, the most poetical ideal. It is the Christian ' The Cathedral of Solothurn is dedicated to St. Ursus. 8i M soldier as he should be, perhaps sometimes was, among men who were to wear the armour that Solothurn should make. One can imagine with what craftsman’s delight, with what memories of his Augsburg days beside the forge of Lorenz Kolman, Holbein wrought that armour—Maximilian’s pattern—that was to be seen and judged by the craftsmen of Solothurn. No painted and gilded futilities for them. It must be armour fit for a man, and a man fit to bear the armour. He is realistic, this St. Ursus of Holbein’s—compare him for a moment with the charming ineffectiveness of Perugino’s “St. George” in our National Gallery—to this extent, that his armour is of the true craftsmen’s sort, the best that muscle and honesty and skill can turn out, the sort of armour that will bear hard knocks, and the man inside it is assuredly of the sort to give them. He is ideal in the sense that he will evoke hero-worship of the best and most wholesome kind in those for whose eyes he was painted. On the other side of the dais on which the Virgin and Child are placed stands St. Martin of Tours, the soldier who became a bishop, also with good reason a favourite patron in a military land and age, and once again with special reason in Solothurn. It is a singularly beautiful face of quiet, reserved, refined strength in the highest sense, and once more absolutely without the least touch of that aesthetic unreality which makes the most spiritual and most lovely visions of an Angelico or a Filippo Lippi too much of heaven for some sons of earth. It is a face the like of which may be seen, though it very rarely is, among men who have passed through the fire and have been purified by it. And that we may take it again was the kind of ideal that a man of Solothurn might want and be likely to get help from. The soldier and the bishop in Holbein’s seeing of them are alike in this, that there is nothing supernatural or unreal in either, nothing that makes them impossible as men, and to men. And as the craftsmanship of the soldier’s armour is beyond reproach from any whose hands found that kind of work to do, so also is the bishop’s equipment superbly wrought by the hand of Holbein. If the armour of the fighter was to be worthy of the man who wore it, so, too, shall be the robe of the bishop. But for criticism of Holbein’s methods of rendering the broideries that a bishop, a king, a princess might wear, a more fitting place will be found hereafter. Of the central figure of the group, the Madonna herself, I have purposely deferred mention to the last. Nothing more womanly, more pure, more gentle, more sweet, and yet more strong has been given to us by any painter who has essayed this subject and made us richer by this vision or by that of divine motherhood. It is possible to point to others who have portrayed one of these qualities singly in a greater degree, or who have exhibited even other qualities in more marked degree. I would not be 82 understood to be exalting Holbein at the expense of other painters. But for all these qualities combined in one embodiment, and inspired with just that touch of the deepest human sympathy which sets up its electric current to the hearts of men, I find it difficult to point to any work, even of the greatest amongst them all, which one can place before this “ Madonna of Solothurn ” and the later “ Madonna of Darmstadt.” We have seen in the last chapter how Holbein saw the Mater Dolorosa touching in himself first, and therefore awakening in others presently the chord of human sympathy, without which no presentment of any ideal ever can become real to us; she is the pure loving mother who has suffered; but the mother of Solothurn is she who has not yet suffered, the young mother absolutely happy in the possession of her child, the type, too, of perfect womanhood, ample, for should not love be ample ? her mantle spread broadly, for should not love be all-encircling? the happy smile upon her lips and in her eyes, for should not purity be happy? If the two figures at her side that act as her supporters are types of manly chivalry, she in her turn is the type of helpful womanhood. It has been said, indeed, that Holbein, who could not have been long married, though we do not know the exact date at which Elsbeth Schmid became his wife, probably had her in his thought as he set down the lines of this noble and sympathetic creation, and that the child upon her knees may represent her first-born. Certainly it is quite consistent with Holbein’s love of realizing idealized qualities through their visible human examples, that he should have let his gratitude for his own late gained happiness shine through the type which he was creating of happy motherhood. It was a form of inspired realism, if one may so call it, that belonged to his temperament. But it is hardly possible to arrive at certainty on a point where evidence is practically absent. The evidence of a very beautiful drawing in silver-point which hangs in the Louvre, and is noted by Wolt- mann in favour of the theory, fails to my mind, first because I am unable to see any likeness therein to the Solothurn face, and secondly because the drawing is not by our Holbein, but by the father, who could never have seen his son’s wife. There is no appeal to the splendid portrait of Elsbeth in 1529, sad-faced, heavy-featured, on whom household care and the “res angusta domi ” have written their lines too plainly. It is difficult, if not impossible, to argue backwards from that portrait to what might have been in 1522. To me the face of the “ Solothurn Madonna ” seems to be rather the expression of a noble type, which Holbein had built up, partly, no doubt, as all men have to build them, from what he saw most worthy and most beautiful around him, partly, too, from the unconscious inspiration which he had drunk in from the art of men who had gone before. Genius is not independent of these sources. They are the food on which it feeds uncon- 83 sciously and which it assimilates. Every great painter has always created for himself a type by which you may know him. It is none the less his creation because you may be able to see the genesis of the conception of it in some earlier or even less considerable painter, and may further know that there was some one living face besides which haunted his genius and was with him at his easel. Out of such component elements, indeed, even the greatest of originators have to build up their creations, as Prometheus his man out of clay, but the creation remains their own—a something inspired owing its true life and essence to their genius. But I must return to this subject after we have presently looked at the second great Madonna which Holbein has given us. Before we pass away, however, from the “ Madonna of Solothurn,” it will be interesting to observe one or two points in the composition of this picture in which Holbein has shown a bold simplicity which makes it almost unique among the examples of this subject. In the first place, Holbein has so far departed from the almost invariable rule by which painters set the figure of the Virgin at the highest central point of the picture, that he has caused the head of the seated Virgin to be lower on the panel than that of the two saints her supporters. He has in fact made the figure central, and given it the highest place only by virtue of its supreme interest and its dignity. Behind the head of the Virgin he has placed the great open semicircular arch of light, a natural halo—notice that both in this picture and in the “ Darmstadt Madonna,” and indeed in most of Holbein’s religious pictures, the supernatural halo is avoided—which, without forcing its purpose at first upon the mind of the beholder, surrounds the central figure with light and glory. As a mere artistic expedient it is of great value in repeating the circular form which has already twice been given below in the rounded head of the child and the coronet on the head of the mother. Across the great open space thus produced Holbein has thrown two plain iron cross-bars such as might be used to support the masonry of an arch where there was danger of collapse. It has been suggested with plausi¬ bility that in the particular church for which the picture was destined there was such an arch, possibly the chancel arch so supported, and it would be quite consistent with Holbein’s manner of thought to insert that homely but easily recognized feature, so as to localize as it were the very presence of the Madonna in that very place. It is as if Holbein wanted to say to those who saw, This is no mere abstraction, no mere vision of Heaven impossible to Earth. This is Divine Love shown in the concrete, as you may see and ought to see it every day in every mother and child among you. She wears no nimbus, the air around you and the arches you are under are her nimbus. The interpretation thus suggested seems to me to be quite the true one, and without it one might perhaps find it difficult to 84 account for why Holbein, who had ready at his finger’s end and in his inventive mind every resource of splendid ornament, rich device, and accomplished drawing, chose this strangely simple resource of a pair of iron stanchions beneath a solid arch. I doubt whether before his time there had been one artist of them all who would have dared to have told his great story in words so simple. But beyond the meaning which Holbein had in using this unexpected setting to his subject—and I believe that in estimating Holbein we must always look for his meaning first, if we are to understand the man—it is easy to see the mere artistic value of this expedient. Two straight iron bars crossing a circle—why did Holbein want them for his composition? Mentally remove them, and the reader will at once see that the great circle of pure air behind the Madonna becomes an empty space in the picture, leaving all the three figures of the group isolated on a lower plane. Replace the bars, and mysteriously the two parts of the picture seem to be once more united; archway, sky, figures and ground have come into one harmony. Those iron bars have in fact done for the artistic construction of the picture, what we saw them doing for the mental conception of it. Again, let the reader place his hand just above the higher bar, cutting off the upper part of the semicircle, and leaving a straight line as the boundary of the picture. All sense of the nimbus disappears from the mind, just as all sense of air and space vanishes from the picture. The figures at once become cramped and undignified, tied to the earth on which they stand. Speaking merely of the picture for one moment as a composition destined to produce pleasure to the eye through the proportion, balance, and shapeliness of its parts, those iron cross-bars and that circle are of inestimable service. The horizontal lines repeat the lower straight line of the step on which the Virgin’s foot rests, and unite by means of the sympathy which the eye always has for similar forms within distances which it can embrace, the upper and lower parts of the picture. The upper circles do the same by the lower circles, adding spaciousness and relieving the monotony of the mere horizontals, while the vertical descending bars do their part in conjunction with the vertical lines of the pier of the arch to break the subject into pleasant spaces and also to repeat, at the same time that they slightly vary, the lines of the standing figures. Holbein was, it is sometimes said, thinker first, designer afterwards. I would rather say that he was thinker and designer without division of time, the mental conception and the artistic conception going so closely hand in hand that the latter became as much the mere vehicle of the former as the language in which a man is compelled to think—for we cannot realize to ourselves the idea of abstract thought without language—becomes absolutely one with the thought itself; as again the words in which a great poet expresses his conception are simultaneous with the thought itself. 85 The “ Solothurn Madonna ” belongs to the year 1522. The other great “Madonna,” known as that of Darmstadt, or sometimes as the “Meier Madonna,” has been commonly assigned to the year 1526, although I am unable to see any very satisfactory reason why it should not be assigned to any of the years between 1522 and 1526. Beyond the latter we can hardly go, since in that year Holbein left Basel for England, not returning till 1529, and it is hardly probable that the picture should have been painted in or after that year, since by that date things had gone forward in such fashion at Basel that the rival parties, the old Catholic party and the Lutherans, were already under arms, not metaphorically but literally, and the day for painting religious pictures was surely past. We have already, in considering the portraits which Holbein painted in 1516 of Jakob Meier, familiarly known as Jakob zum Hasen, and of his wife, given some account of the man who, having been burgomaster of Basel up to 1521, and having been recognized as the head of the old Catholic party, was in that same year ejected, and a year or so later fined and imprisoned. He was a man of sturdy character, and certainly not inclined to hide his colours, since in the year 1524 we find him as captain of a band of paid volunteers who joined the French king in Italy. He never recovered his position in Basel, and in 1527 the decree which banned him from office was made final. The other branches of his family had espoused the reformed cause, leaving him as the only supporter of his name of the old Catholic party. And this fact will help to explain to us why this masterpiece was allowed in later years to pass out of the family. Jakob Meier had given this commission to Holbein to paint himself and his wife and his children still at the feet of the Mother of Mercy, though it was perhaps his adherence to the cause which to his mind she typified that had brought trouble to his house. We cannot at this distance of time, even in the case of those on whose actions history throws more light than it does on those of this plain burgomaster of Basel, pretend to pass infallible verdicts on the motives and the acts of men. But as we look at this picture and remember the circumstances under which it was painted, we feel pretty safe in saying that Jakob Meier zum Hasen was at least staunch to his faith as he knew it. We lose sight of him after the year 1529; we should, indeed, have lost sight of him for ever, or rather say we should never even have heard of him but for this picture of Holbein’s. One cannot grudge him the immortality which he gained from it. The picture, like the first owner, passed through many vicissitudes. I may spare the reader the detailed evidences,^ documentary and other, of its wanderings, and be content with recording the ascertained facts. It is heard of early in the seventeenth century as belonging to the Fesch family, who * These will be found in Dr. Woltmann’s “ Holbein and his Times” by anyone who desires to verify them. 86 had inherited it from their ancestress, Anna Meier, the eldest girl who kneels beside her mother in the picture. It passed from the Fesch family to Lucas Iselin, and thence to one Le Blond, a painter, who purchased it at the price of 3,000 gulden, nominally for the dowager Marie dei Medici, then living in Belgium. The picture never passed into her possession, but became the property of one Lossert, at whose sale in October, 1709, at Amsterdam, it was sold for 2,000 florins. What became of it thenceforward is not known. But in 1822 it reappeared in the hands of a French dealer, who sold it for 2,500 thalers to Prince William of Prussia, from whom it passed to its present resting-place in the palace at Darmstadt. Meanwhile the fine copy which is now at Dresden, and which had been purchased at Venice, had long been considered to be an original picture from the hand of Holbein. But that same picture has been traced back to Amsterdam, and it has become tolerably certain that during the time when the original picture was at Amsterdam this copy was made by some painter, probably of the Dutch school, who, departing in some particulars from his original, yet preserved on the whole no small share of the spirit of Holbein’s great work. When, at the exhibition of Holbein’s collected works some years ago, the two pictures could be examined side by side, all doubt was removed. It will probably be long before such an opportunity occurs again, but Darmstadt is no far pilgrimage from Dresden, and if the journey be made from one to the other while the impression of either picture is still fresh in the mind, the superiority of the Darmstadt picture at all points will not for one moment be contested. It may be added that the original picture has suffered remarkably little from the effects of time. The cleaning off of the old varnish some years ago was happily unattended by any injury, and there can be no better testimony to the sound and simple craftsmanship of the master than the condition of this masterpiece after three hundred and seventy years of existence. Once more I absolve myself from the necessity of enumerating details and describing poses which anyone may examine for himself. On the other hand, I may do wisely by drawing attention to one or two points of difference between the original and the copy which might easily escape notice, and, since a thousand know the picture only through the Dresden copy, where not more than a score have seen the Darmstadt original, I have thought it best to reproduce both, merely cautioning the reader that the Darmstadt picture, being fuller in tone and less hard in its line, does, in spite of clearer definition in some portions of it, suffer by reproduction far more than the copy suffers. The most important difference lies in the fact that the copyist, evidently dissatisfied with Holbein’s type, has sought to give what appeared to him to be increase of gracefulness by several expedients, such as diminishing slightly the size of the head, so as to make the figure seem taller. Furthermore, he has 87 raised the two side portions of the picture by increasing the distance between the heads of the kneeling figures and the top of the frame. And he has greatly increased the height of the central canopy, so as to leave more space above the Madonna’s coronet. The kneeling figures are almost of the same size in either picture, and the figure of the Virgin herself is not actually taller in the copy, the appearance of greater height being obtained merely by the change of proportion. In the actual portraits of the donor and his family the copyist has evidently sought to be accurate. In his painting of the details he has allowed himself freedom. Thus the carpet on which the group kneels differs considerably in colour and somewhat in actual pattern. In the copy its colours are more strongly contrasted, they include more of black and of red, and there are small points of difference in the design, while the whole stands out in clearer and harsher definition. The carpet in the original is of softly harmonized and perfectly blended tints, such as occur in an originally fine oriental carpet which time has helped. Indeed, the colour throughout the Dresden is, when compared with that of the Darmstadt picture, harsher and more assertive. The dress of the “ Dresden Madonna” is of a somewhat harder darkish green-blue—a colour due probably to the fact that at the time when the copy was made the varnish of the original had yellowed by time, and had caused the blue robe to assume a greenish tinge. Naturally, too, the crimson girdle comes against this colour with a somewhat more assertive note. The red of the elder brother’s stockings is of a somewhat brighter red in the copy, and the flesh tints are ruddier and less subtly modelled. The handling of the golden-coloured sleeve of the Virgin’s dress is in the original a piece of superb technical achievement, as rich and satisfying as if it had come from the hand of a Venetian. In the copy it is comparatively frigid. Indeed, without dispraising too severely the work of the copyist at Dresden, which is really of great merit and probably as good and as sympathetic with its original as any copy can ever be, one may see that he encountered and partially, but not wholly mastered that problem of reconciling slightly antagonistic colours which had quite ceased to give Holbein himself the slightest difficulty. Holbein’s colouring in this picture is once more wholly his own. He does not evolve rich and splendid har¬ monies, as the Venetians did, out of colours which when looked at one at a time are found to be not high in scale, but he employs those contrasts of colour to which his eye had always been used, since they were of the German wear of the day, and subdues them till they yield him a result which, though it is quite unlike that of the Venetians, is yet not less harmonious, although less gorgeous and less sensuous than theirs. But he is a difficult man to follow in this. And those who attempted to follow him in it, or who, without any attempt to follow him in it, yet had to face the same problems of colour in the German school of the day—Hans Baldung, for example— 88 . show us at times how much easier it was to be crude than to be harmonious. The copyist who achieved the Dresden version is not to be accused of crudity nor inharmonious colouring, far from it, but if the two pictures could be again set side by side the mastery of Holbein would at once assert itself. I would also call attention to one more detail. In dealing with the earliest set of Passion paintings at Basel, especially the “Scourging,” I asked the reader to notice the strong dark outline which Holbein used around his figures and indeed around all objects. This line was never, as we then said, wholly abandoned by him. The Dresden copyist has reduced it to a minimum, especially around the hands. In the Darmstadt original it is clearer, stronger, and darker, not very thick, but very firm and unhesitating. There is one further small point of distinction which, since it connects itself with a feature of Holbein’s work, may with profit be recorded. If any genuine picture by Holbein be examined, whether of his earliest period in Basel or of his latest period in England, where he has to deal with any kind of pattern such as was involved in the intricacies of embroidery, it is invariably worked out with a precision so exact that no thread is wanting, but that a continuous and firm tracing can be made of it without missing a stitch. His practice in this respect is wholly unlike to that of the later painters—Velazquez, Franz Hals, Van Dyck, or even to that of the con¬ temporary Venetians, who summarize and suggest to the eye a rich pattern by a few masterly strokes, which the eye takes up and unconsciously con¬ tinues for itself. Neither method is righter than the other. But Holbein’s method, supremely expressive in his hands, is in the hands of any man of less genius apt to degenerate into mere laborious accuracy, or to take the place and usurp the interest in the picture which ought to be left for the products of the higher imagination. With Holbein it never so degenerates. It is to him the natural and only method of expressing himself—absolute perfection of craftsmanship in all that he handles carried into every part of the picture and yet all of it so kept in due relation and due subordination because of the dominating presence of the higher interests and aims of the picture that you are unconscious until you begin purposely to forget these higher interests in order to search into his way of doing things that you are looking at a work in which industry and perfect craftsmanship have borne their part in carrying out the master-thought. There are other ways of doing it, no less worthy to be admired in art which is differently constructed, but this was Holbein’s way, and so far as I know there is no exception to it in all his work. We shall come upon it again in the latest of his English portraits, as we came upon it in the broideries of his first Dorothea Kannengiesser. And if the test be applied to these two pictures which we are now considering it will be found that the Darmstadt picture presents this characteristic of Holbein’s technical method in every particular. It may be tested most easily in the yellow embroidery on the camicia of the girl, whereas in the copy the pattern is halting, tremulous and disconnected. The question is one of detail, and I must not allow it any longer to with¬ hold us from the view of the higher interests of the picture. In the “Solothurn Madonna” Holbein in his conception of St. Ursus and St. Martin was, as we have seen, called upon to create two types which should be convincing by reason of their embodying those qualities in a visible form which should be the outward signs, as they are usually seen by men, of the character within. They were to be portraits of character rather than portraits of individuals. In the “ Meier Madonna he was spared that necessity, and he could indulge his unrivalled power of presenting individu¬ ality in actual portrait. The task which had now been set him was, in a certain sense, the converse of that which he had set himself at Solothurn. He had in that to create an ideal for a community; this was to be a presence for a home. The supporters of that Madonna were to be the type of the men by whose strength a city is made strong; the supporters of this Madonna were to be those whose wisdom establishes the house. He was indeed to create for us the Madonna of the House. How far he has done that for us can be felt only by those who have stood before that picture. I doubt if it can be understood by any other means. Holbein has to make his point of departure the six portraits of the Meier household. They must be real, living, as far as he can make them so. Holbein can accept from himself nothing short of that—does not, indeed, dream of accepting anything short of it, even if Jakob Meier had been ready to consent. The picture is for the comfort of him, and for his, and not in this case for others except by accident. Therefore they need a perpetual record that they are living in the presence of the Gracious Mother and her Divine Son, and they want also to feel that Mother and Son are there among them in a presence that they can realize, and in daily sympathy with them and their home. She must therefore, Holbein feels, be neither shadowy nor vaguely spiritual, not removed by any aethereal beauty nor supernatural attributes (she wears no halo) above the head of the pure domestic affections and the pure family life. She must be close to them and they to her, and the bond of this closeness will be brought home rather to the sympathy than to the mind by the reality of the love which he can create through his vision of the Virgin and her Child. She stands upon no dais or throne, her feet are on the same level as that of the others, and her throne is the carpet—probably exact to its original—of Jakob Meier’s house. * It is very interesting to find that among the Russian peasantry, whose simple broideries for their own domestic use still retain the best qualities of the art. one particular stitch is known still as the Holbein stitch, the name being of course carried over to them from the German provinces. 90 It imf H - - -S;- 1V 00(3 8 a. fee cvnvTiW^jr ^ VJaifijNi ^*ta whidt-- - ' . BjffiU, o( the charactiae^ii®^^ lhaa portrahs trf uwlttife^: ' Dascr^siiy. l»c ^ ^ ia actii^:fW!&5Mfc. ‘Pkf ocran sea^L tS^ .wrtcW^ }|4lu^ 0x£r«(»»aa ideai ' Ihr - ' - i* -■ W-'iW ?\'" 4 ^ifep^..■*%@- a^> i s viif #^'- ; -- i_ -- • . 4 * • ' *■•' - iSi" -ii-- .&:.: 4 . - -. ^. -- - airtfi-isaas.^^^# " ; ^S' MHiay. ao>fAi jio'*! wj'ra «!- She walks the house with them. If she had stood on throne or dais she would not have done that. She is above them only because they have knelt to do reverence to the highest and holiest type of pure womanhood. She is, so to speak, as tangible as they, and as real as they, the real and the ideal meeting as they often do, the ideal being made possible to our love and to our understanding through the real. But Holbein in thus creating a type which is in the highest sense womanly, and which moves us and holds us through its appeal to the highest human sympathies, does not in this realization omit the element which shall also show her to us as queenly. Indeed, I have never stood before a picture which so bows the heart and compels reverence of feeling as this. Something perhaps in the simple representation of plain and by no means beautiful people kneeling in utter reverence, they and their household, before that embodiment of queenly womanhood and of trusting childhood, moves one as no idealizing of these wholly in earnest burgher folk would have done. The faces and the figures of these manly worshippers tell their tale in a way which gets its echo out of any heart. The faces of Meier and of his wife are incomparable pieces of portraiture given under the effect of strong and true emotion. There is no graceful attitudinizing, no theatrical display, and no ecstatic piety in the magistrate of Basel and his wife. Remember that in this picture Holbein, himself a northerner, was painting the temperament of the northerner, of the Teutonic, not of the Italian race. Emotion runs deep but still among that people. South of the Alps and among the Latin races feeling, none the less true, expresses itself with less reserve and with more outward and visible sign of passionate emotion. For my own part I am glad that Holbein was drawn to the north and not to the south, since much contact with Italian art might have perhaps robbed us of one who looked at the people and the feelings of his North with that single eye which borrowed little or nothing of colour, gesture, motive from the South. We needed such a man to tell us what was in us, and to tell us that the Italian races and Latin influences had no monopoly in the production of the men who can be called the great ones in art. And save that at the day of his appearing the world was out of joint for the time being, it may be that he would have given us many another masterpiece, not indeed finer than these two Madonnas, for I hardly think that possible, but capable of bowing the heart, just as Raphael and other painters gave us not one but many which still move the heart of men. But Holbein, by the accident of place and time, when the whole of northern Europe was upheaving for the Reformation, was asked for no more Madonnas, and was driven to live by the portraits of the men and of the women who played their part in that great historical drama. We may be grateful enough for that. We wanted to know what the men and women of 91 our Tudor day were like. It is our own fault if we do not. But the Madonnas of Solothurn and of Darmstadt show us that which men and women of all races, of all types and of all times, will always want to see, the vision of true and manly reverence before a high ideal shown to us by a supremely great artist. And as one turns away from this Madonna, and knows that it was the last which Holbein was to paint, it is impossible not to feel that the man had in him still further messages of grandeur and of beauty for which men of all creeds would have been the richer if he might have sent them to us. The Madonna herself in this picture is true queen and true mother in one. She is crowned as a queen should be, and she wears her crown with a queenly modesty. Womanly in her attitude and mien, holding the Child with the tenderest handling of love, while she looks down both at Him and at those who kneel at her feet. The Child’s face indeed is somewhat sad and worn, which gave rise to the sweet unauthorized legend that the picture represents a thank-offering for the recovery of Meier s youngest boy. The idea, and it is so graceful that one wishes it had been true, was that Holbein has represented the Madonna as taking the sick child in her arms while she restores to the Meier family their boy in good health. The idea is of modern origin and without authority. More probably the look of sadness in the Divine Child’s face is set there of deliberate intent. It is the foreshadow in the young Child of the future Man of Sorrows. The legend arose doubtless among those to whom the Dresden version alone was familiar, and it has been urged that if they had known the original they would not have been tempted to have framed the legend ; one writer even speaks of the child in the “ Darmstadt Madonna ” as “ the happy child ” in the Virgin’s arms. It is quite true that in the Dresden copy the worn look on the Child’s face is much emphasized, but I think it certainly exists also in a quite appreciable degree, and I think of deliberate intention, in the “ Darmstadt Madonna.” It may be claimed for these two great Madonnas by Holbein, of Solo¬ thurn and of Darmstadt, that they are amongst the most individual and original conceptions which occur in the whole range of art. The type which he created is his own, stamped with his own greatness, and eloquent of his own personality. As an original thinker, indeed, he may claim place beside the greatest in Art—may claim to stand with those very few who have expressed for the world of all time the greatest ideas in the greatest language, and have yet remained themselves in the expression of them. For to be original in any form of Art, whether it be sculpture or painting or letters or music, is to approach the existing spiritual and physical materials of life, not in such a way as to alter those materials, to distort, to falsify or to parody them, but in such a way as to show the material, to exhibit the thought from a standpoint which shall be felt to be the thinker’s own, and not a mere copy or a following of somebody else. It is rather a great and independent 92 th4un S!Brraw»^^44fci,*^ -—-^ r...'- > orifio^ io«ci^«>i«*biste'*c^ii»-tfe-' a bca«^«d <« bi*w«, «amps<5 wfe ' a*M» {*rs«iitlk)f. ^ an t'J’iginal thhikcr. •^•■■'*' ' -‘ ^-■~ f'' - ; ^ fpx^Xeait ta Art*—*tiay daim to stand v!S^*** fwfSS^i** ^ '- I ■*‘'^ dieeptfUww..> *' tbUtfc:^ -»i((tc*-» t«iy-W b? «i^ 3a;^S3oa*„-«:^ _. frr\(>-5.' «iata8ft^ vtcbicH -ttaft ** , ji*.df s^isn^iawSy€fiic> RU rath*#i-e^S ^«ai; .. iJ £i -b-,;-. ^ iHt ll»ff sTfiiiteiiy quests «i is Gerard David, one wlic-’ to as a direct infiucrict' ujKii - “ Madonna.StifTtKind rd by SaMi*- --^;, treasur^’j;; ' , M » t-l t&ir - ■■ ' 'TSilr^i -.r/ •*? ^ ’ 3 t.*:i 5 a#>i < 5 >-« ■ -'"ik IW^'T ;r *— -:a^ ^ V ^ i^ ji'.suj" V '. - - *> ?’' ' Vi V-w* V .:^-V ? 40 te j !>jvui Cv ' -:- ■M h*41i*GS animated in ':-^ - before . ...i, , ^ .t../ ’W^lonTu! /.:••• ■-i: >'.4 -tiF^-u --tly. ^ .-c .••• ^’: ^'- - • ♦ . > . . n V'?^- V, .Y'^* •M- - r. lln^^S ‘ Ssrv %i ; >xvxi, by H3iaM A’/WA xoH /aura JHSAfl X. in going to or returning from England, Bruges lies at a very short distance from his probable point of departure and arrival, namely, Flushing. But it must be admitted that, though there is no documentary or other direct evidence in favour of the “Meier Madonna” having been painted in 1526 or before it, the date of Holbein’s return to Basel in 1528 is less probable, because by that time the religious question had burnt to a white heat and men had already put on their armour in no metaphorical sense. The giving and accepting of a commission for the picture at such a moment are less probable than at the earlier date, though I do not think we can quite assert that they were impossible. There is yet another possibility which must be considered. It has often been suggested—where a visit to Italy is involved we shall consider the question presently—that Holbein during the ten years of his sojourn at Basel may have travelled somewhat widely in search of art and possibly also in hope of commissions. One such journey as far as Lyons is certainly known, and there may have been others. It hardly seems probable, however, that he should have wandered as far as Bruges, since, if he had done so, he must assuredly also have visited Antwerp, where he would have made the acquaintance of Quentin Matsys. In 1526, however, when he starts for England, we find him taking a letter of introduction from Erasmus to Matsys as if it were his first visit thither, which shows that no such acquaintance had previously been made. But without going so far as Bruges, he might in his wanderings have touched some point northwards where Flemish art was to be seen and where his admiration was aroused. Nor again is it impossible that works by Gerard David and the great Flemings may have found their way to Basel. But neither of the last two suppositions, we must observe, would bring Holbein in contact with that particular picture of the “Madonna with the Virgin Saints,” which was safely sheltered since 1509 in the church of the Carmelites at Bruges. None of the three possibilities save the first—the postdating of the “Meier Madonna”—will make it possible for Holbein to have seen that picture by Gerard David before he found his own ideal. It is of course in no way necessary to limit the possible influence to this or to any single picture or single master of the school. It may have grown out of an acquaintance with some work or works of the Flemish school which gave the first direction to Holbein’s preference, and which he unconsciously incorporated, as men do, into his own ideal. It is even possible that the similarity of type may be pure coincidence, an ideal developed quite independently by two men who both derived the first inspirations of their youth from an earlier ideal which descended to each by a different channel. The question is one of great interest and very suggestive in the history of Holbein’s art, but it is not one on which absolute certainty can be arrived at in the absence of more definite evidence. 95 The original studies for three of the Meier family in this group, for Jakob Meier, for Dorothea Kannengiesser and for the daughter Anna Meier, are preserved in the gallery at Basel and are reproduced in this volume. We shall have later opportunities of examining Holbein’s methods in his preliminary studies when we come to deal with the great Windsor series. For the present it is enough to say that these earlier studies are as delightful in their artistic quality, as consummate in their seizure of character, and as simple and as masterly in their handling as anything which he ever accomplished. The studies for the other persons—of whom the woman who kneels next the Madonna is believed to be Holbein’s first wife—are unhappily lost. Indeed, it must not be forgotten that rich as the collection at Basel is in the early treasure of Holbein’s opening period, it is hardly to be supposed that it represents more than a twentieth part of that which he produced in that period, since it is composed practically of the examples which one man, Boniface Amerbach, to his honour had gathered, the salvage from the wreck which time, fanaticism, neglect and folly have made of the works of an incomparable artist. 96 CHAPTER X SOME OTHER PICTURES B efore we leave the first Basel period of Holbein’s art and follow him to England, it will be useful, for the sake of completeness, to devote a short chapter to a few pictures which bear, some rightly and some with more doubtful claim, his name in various galleries, and which, if they are from his hand at all, could only have been executed by him in these earlier days. I have already explained that I must postpone his work for the wood-engravers and the'publishers, as well as his work for the gold¬ smith and the jeweller, for special treatment at the end of the book. It will, therefore, be only at this point necessary to say that the bulk of his book illustration and of his designs for woodcuts was executed before his departure in 1526 for England, including the famous designs for the Old and New Testaments, the “Alphabet of Death,” and above all the so-called “ Dance of Death ” series, in which his power of imagination and his dramatic force reach their highest level. I suggested at the end of the last chapter that of those eleven years of his Basel period we possess but a very small salvage, and it is an unwelcome task to have to diminish the tale of genuine pictures by him. But it is an unfortunate fact that no man has suffered so much from that spontaneous tribute to his value, which consists in attributing to him the inferior work of other men. It was computed by Waagen that of all the pictures in England ascribed to Holbein not more than two out of every seven could be consented to as genuine. The liberal recantations that have taken place in the last twenty years in foreign galleries have still left not a few upon their walls that give the spectator pause. The issue, indeed, is often obscured by the fact that restoration has so dulled and clouded the surface of the picture, that one great means of verification has been obliter¬ ated. I shall make no attempt to examine any considerable quantity of these doubtful works either in public or private, English or foreign galleries. To do so would be to prolong this book to inordinate length and to intoler¬ able dullness. It is no part of the scheme of these pages to analyze the whole of Holbein’s work, or even the majority of them. Neither, I trust, will the reader ask me in the course of them to give any preference to English examples over foreign, nor to rarely seen examples in private hands above those which are accessible to all in public galleries. The aim of this book is to select the most typical and most excellent examples of Holbein’s work 97 o along the whole course of his life, or those which, though not so desirable, illustrate some special point of his characteristics, or show his connection with or separation from the art of other men. And if this book should succeed, which is almost more than I dare hope, in engaging the interest of any who have not before studied Holbein with deep attention, then by sending them to the presence of the man himself in the pictures which he certainly did paint, I shall have led them to form their own standard for judging of what he did not paint, and shall avoid cumbering my pages with very dreary detail. In Hampton Court Gallery is a very interesting and very meritorious picture of “The Saviour and Mary Magdalene at the Sepulchre.” This picture is one which, in a gallery of fictitious Holbeins, has far more claim to respect than most which bear his name there. It was not one of the English examples which were sent to represent the painter at the exhibition of his collected works at Darmstadt in 1871, but it was one of those which were shown in the very interestingWinter Exhibition of Old Masters at Burlington House in 1880. Opinions are, however, still divided as to its authenticity. It has been accepted by competent judges as the work of Holbein, and it has been rejected by others whose opinion has equal weight. Dr. Wolt- mann, indeed, goes so far as to name the painter, Bartolomaeus Bruyn, to whom he would assign it. The picture has suffered by injury and by restoration, but neither on the grounds of its design nor of its technique do I find myself able to accept it as a work of Holbein. That it is the work of a painter of the German school who had probably seen and been deeply influenced by the grave and earnest works of Holbein at Basel, one may readily concede. But the picture, which, if it were by Holbein, would have to be assigned to one of the years between 1516 and 1526, possesses exactly some of those very traits which, while they still remained characteristic of the German school, had not survived in the work, even in the early work, of Holbein. In this connection I would draw attention to the angular and uncouth projection of the forward leg in the figure of our Lord, an exaggera¬ tion which is repeated with even more unnatural emphasis in the distant figure of St. Peter as he walks and gesticulates at the side of- St. John. The action, moreover, of the hands of the chief figure, intended to be expressive of the “ Noli me tangere,” is somewhat exaggerated and theatrical. It should be compared with the Passion series at Basel already dealt with, from which three reproductions are given in this book. The figure, too, of Mary Magdalene, though graceful and pleasing, is of too studied a gracefulness and of too superficial an earnestness to convince us of Holbein’s design. If careful attention be given to the cast of the drapery in that figure, it will be found to be gracefully impossible. It neither hangs by its own weight, nor is it thrown out into the naturally vigorous lines 98 which the hasty action of the figure would necessarily have produced. I cannot believe that Holbein would have given us a figure of so much studied grace and of so little force. And be it remembered that those who accept this as a design by Holbein would place it within the period which produced the Passion series just mentioned, the “Solothurn Madonna” and the "Meier Madonna.” I would also notice the presence of the halo around the Saviour’s head as a feature which is generally omitted by Holbein when he deals with any actual incident in the history of the Saviour. When we come to the technical details of the picture, it is right to repeat the admission that the force of the negative evidence is greatly obscured by the fact that the picture has been much retouched. If we could accept the handling of the trees, for example, as we now see it, as the original work of the painter, we should at once pronounce that Holbein had no share in it. It is what one of his admirers a few years later would have described as " mere slubbered work ” compared to his. The elaborate painting of the vase which the Magdalene holds has been appealed to as evidence of Holbein’s craftsmanship, I find myself quite unable to see in it the same masterly handling which is visible in Holbein’s undoubted work of the period, as, for example, in the " Man of Sorrows ” and " Mater Dolorosa ” already described. To the date of 1522 are assigned two upright panels representing St. Ursula and St. George, which are to be found in the Carlsruhe Gallery, and which are figured in several works which deal with Hans Holbein. I cannot accept these weak and slightly affected figures as the work of the man who in that year was producing the St. Ursus and the St. Martin of the " Solothurn Madonna.” A portrait of some merit, though of no great strength, hangs in the Darmstadt Grand Ducal Gallery,^ It represents a young man in a deep crimson under-vest and scarlet mantle against a bright blue background. It is in my opinion the work, and not a bad example, of Ambros Holbein, in spite of the inscription, which has the monogram " H H ” and the date 1515. This inscription is painted on a white band which runs across the bottom of the panel, and could easily have been inserted at a subsequent period, as unhappily was not unfrequently done in the case of a painter whose works from the very first had a greater value than those of any of his contemporaries with the one exception of Albrecht Dtirer. Comparison should be made between this picture and the portrait of Hans Herbster which formerly belonged to Lord Northbrook, and was atttributed to Hans Holbein, and has since 1898 hung in the Basel Gallery, and has been restored to its true author, Ambros Holbein. Of different and far greater interest is a drawing which hangs in the collection at Basel, and of whose authorship there has never been any doubt, ‘ See “ Holbein,” H. Knackfuss. Grevel and Co., London, 1899, p. 8. 99 It is slightly but forcibly handled in black chalk touched with colour, and it is generally accepted, though not quite without question, as a portrait of Holbein from his own hand. It was once the property of Bonifacius Amerbach, and formed part of the Amerbach Collection. Where doubt is expressed, as in this case, as to the identity of the person who is represented in a portrait, there is no final solution of the doubt possible except by appeal to some other undoubted portrait of the same individual at about the same age. Unhappily we have nothing of the kind to appeal to. For my own part, I find, after careful comparison of this portrait with the two portraits of Holbein as a child at Augsburg by his father and with the silver-point drawing from the same hand of the two brothers, no difficulty in believing that we have here a portrait of the great painter himself. The portraits of Holbein as a child and as a boy have very marked peculiarities, one of which is the great breadth of the face at the upper level of the cheek bones, the strongly defined jaw and chin, and the general massiveness of the head. And these features are visible also in the Basel portrait, so that to an eye which is used to the changes which take place in individuals as they pass from boyhood to manhood the identity of the four portraits will not seem at all difficult to accept. The Basel portrait in question, which is a broadly and slightly touched sketch in black chalk heightened with colour, is very convincing as a rendering of a young man, whether it be Holbein or no, of some twenty to five and twenty years old. It is a quiet and self-possessed face of considerable power, the round and massive skull, the great breadth across the cheek bones, and the well-built, capacious and upright forehead, together with the firm mouth and powerful jaw, all reminding us of the type which from time to time in Germany has been repeated among the possessors of great intellectual power, as in Ludwig von Beethoven, in Goethe, and in many another. The internal evidence of the face itself indeed may fairly be said to be in favour of its authenticity. There are in that same gallery at Basel, from which we have so often had to quote during the early years of Holbein’s career, two small panels which, though they can hardly claim great importance on their own merits, are yet of some interest, since they serve to introduce the question of the influence of Italian art upon the great German. The two panels represent apparently the same young woman. The first of these is a portrait of a fair-haired girl (photographic reproduction conveys both in this and in the companion picture the idea of dark hair and complexion), very richly attired in a slashed crimson velvet boddice with sleeves of old gold colour, who holds up with one hand a skirt of the blue tone such as Raphael used in the “ Belle Jardiniere” and the “ Madonna del Cardellino.” In front of her is a stone ledge of a balcony or window, on which lies a heap of gold coins, while her right hand is stretched forward with a gesture which obviously demands a lOO 4 . irj 3 K&-;.n». V;,..; . .i* ^ j:ia itf#' aAl'.ii Vit'-C ^CjiUKO 'A'hicb Vi u^i to ttw changcii from ba>'hood _ to manhood iIk at all diftfcyt to rLi:u;|il. ii.- and t4 • . -^WgSk'^ ♦■^•>---11^ lifr.i .'_ <.»oet|^Brd ii> many attaitf% -iMr f saui Hi ^ 7 , v- w.*-MUhntsa!.:r. ■ * ^»fr:jTtKt»<»^ily . V jr» h :: Jiy 1^^.: ^ ■ •-■^ 4 . * rf 't * 4 ^* V<» V?»1 ^;'«r --7 IIJM ^ J ajfyilsowt ^ *43^ VlAU a ho TlAKl^lOH 'ijM«KiIi v« ziajiJtiH 'loTAnT vj.i/.i'nmdAMT further supply. If the meaning of the picture remained in doubt that doubt is removed by the inscription on the front of the stone ledge, “ Lais Corinthiaca, 1526." The other picture is similar in handling, colour, and general style, but it represents the same person in the character of Venus with a small child as Cupid in front of her. These pictures will at once strike anyone who knows them, either through the originals or through the reproductions, as differing in a very marked manner from anything else which we know to have come from the hand of Holbein, and they have given rise to widely different opinions concerning their origin, which may be classified as follows : Rumohr believes them to be the work of a Netherlandish artist; Wornum puts them down to an unknown Milanese painter ; Waagen believes them to have been painted by Holbein under Netherlandish influence; Woltmann assigns them unhesi¬ tatingly to Holbein himself, and Knackfuss agrees to the latter ascription. It is worth mentioning, as an example of how history is made,, that Wolt¬ mann remarks without reserve that the perfection of the execution “shows that Holbein had received a commission for them yielding a satisfactory recompense,” while Knackfuss goes a step farther and asserts that there can be no possible doubt as to the relations which existed between Holbein and the lady, since she is depicted as Lais, and the inference is obvious that Holbein must have been the Apelles in the case. The reader will not ask me to analyze the value of such very gratuitous conclusions. The inventory of the collection made by Basilius Amerbach, long after the death both of Holbein and of Bonifacius Amerbach, states that the panel is a portrait of a lady of the house of Offenburg. And curious investigators have discovered that there was a certain Dorothea Offenburg who figures in the Basel divorce court, and who would not be seriously libelled perhaps by being identified with Lais Corinthiaca. The inventory assigns the portrait to Holbein. It is, however, necessary to point out that the said inventory is by no means infallible. It was not drawn up by the original owner and collector, nor were its particulars registered till fifty years and more had passed since the pictures were first collected, and we know only too well what apparently incredible mistakes are made in perfect good faith when catalogues of pictures are drawn up under such circumstances. It is not improbable that Bonifacius Amerbach possessed works that had not been painted by Holbein, or even that such works should have got themselves added to the collection without having belonged to Amerbach. And on the authorship of the picture, and even on the identity of the subject—which latter piece of information may be due simply to unconfirmed gossip—I hold that the evidence of the inventory is of but slight authority. It will be safest to judge of the correctness of their attri¬ bution to Hans Holbein on the internal evidence of the pictures themselves. lOI I may say at once that I am quite unable to see any Netherlandish influence or probable authorship in the pictures. On the other hand, I see the strongest evidence of Lombard influence, and that in so direct a fashion and to such a degree that I believe them to be the work of some Lombard artist who had come under the influence of the later work of Raphael. The name of Cesare da Sesto at once occurs to one, and if it were not for the date 1526 on the Lais picture there would be no great difficulty in accepting it as a work by him which had found its way across from Milan—possibly even in the pack of Holbein himself. But Cesare da Sesto died, it is said, at Milan in 1524. Inscriptions, especially on pictures attributed to Holbein, are, it might be urged, easy to add. But if this inscription were an added forgery the forger would have, if he had any honest intent, surely gone one step further and have added Holbein’s monogram, as was done, in my opinion, with the Darmstadt portrait. To assign it therefore to Cesare da Sesto may be narrowing the ascription of the picture too closely to a single name, whereas the works bear the character which was impressed upon many followers of the Lombard school. One more difficulty must be fairly stated. In the picture of “Venus and Cupid” it will be at once seen that the child, who in the original has red hair, strongly resembles the type of child which occurs in the “ Meier Madonna” and also in the younger child in the group of Holbein’s wife and children painted in 1529.^ The type is so peculiar and so unlike that which we And in the Lombard school to which the face of the woman attaches itself, that I believe that it is due to a subsequent alteration and repainting of the child over the older work, so as to make it conform to Holbein’s type. It is even conceivable that Holbein may have actually inserted the figure of the child there de novo to turn it into a picture of “Venus and Cupid,” and in experimenting on these pictures to endeavour to form a conclusion, I have found that if the child with its arrows be entirely removed from the picture, there remains the figure of the woman very much resembling the attitude and motive of the Lais—one hand outstretched and one probably gathering up the folds of the skirt. If the original picture is examined it will be found that there is nothing to make this view impossible on the score of technique. The position may be stated thus: It is as difficult to see Holbein in the two pictures of the woman, as it is to see anyone but Holbein in the picture of the child. Now if we take the view, with Woltmann and others, that both works are wholly by Holbein, nothing is more certain than this, that he was consciously and of deliberate intent for the moment painting in imitation of the Milanese school, and that with so much success that he has misled not Upon the old frame of this picture are found the words in Latin, “The word of the Lord endureth for ever”—a quotation which is as difficult to explain in reference to the subject as the characteristics of the picture itself. 102 ■ If , . ..,, - r , . •-. n . . I J ' ■ •> T I. ■■■■.■^- : - - ■ •*•.■, ••. •■'i"L,• ■':•■’ * i .M ' , ■ .' * • •' ' •• , ... ^ y V* • ^ • • ' . ' !* • ' i I ' . L ‘ • •* •i '* ' V ' , . ’ •• , .• I ,,f . I ' • . i ' * • />V ' * >*- '. •»* i . . • • - .* • ►' M S- y : ' i ' 1 V' .*- w .... ; f - ■ •• u • . .A* LfK- t f a few into believing them to be the actual work of a Milanese. And in that case we have to ask ourselves this question: Since Holbein shows himself possessed of sufficient skill and trick of imitation to completely realize the type which he was imitating in the case of the woman, how came it that he w'as unable or unwilling to carry out his imitation to the point of also giving us a child of the Milanese type, whereas the child which he has given to us is of the Holbeinesque type? If, however, my explanation may be accepted, the difficulty disappears. Holbein possessing, or seeing in possession of Amerbach, these two small examples, very similar in attitude and motive, inserts into one of them a figure of a child, which gives some variety, and enables him to attach a fresh subject to the somewhat trivial action of the picture. I should for my own part also think it highly probable that to the other picture he had added the coins on the window sill and the title “Lais Corinthiaca,” so as to turn a somewhat unmeaning picture of a woman into a quasi-classical personality. The Offenburg tradition I should wholly reject, nor indeed can I persuade myself that these pictures are portraits by Holbein either of that shadowy lady or of any other lady whatever. They appear to me to be pictures, not of some well-marked personality, but merely Lombard school types. Let the reader who knows Holbein’s portraiture, with its extraordinary invariable grasp of the individual in each case, ask himself if these are Holbein’s portraits of a young German woman of his day. And I would also draw attention to the fact that these pictures to be by Holbein must have been painted by him in about the year 1526, by which date he had painted the “Solothurn Madonna” and probably also the “Meier Madonna.” Can we conceive any particular motive which Holbein could have had in that hour of his strength and his individuality in choosing to paint this young woman, who presumably had some character in her face, under the trivial guise of a second-rate Lombard type? If he was prepared to paint the likeness of a not very estimable lady, why should he shrink from painting her, as he painted all his other known portraits, as he saw her?^ In rejecting these two pictures as the work of Holbein, I do not at all suggest that the rejection or acceptance of them has any final bearing on the question of whether Holbein had visited Italy or no. Karel Van Mander and the old writers following him expressly state that he had not. But the evidence of these writers is so often found to be untrustworthy where we have the means of testing their positive statements, that no great weight ^ Since the above opinions were written I have accidentally found in the Accademia collection at Venice two sheets of drawings of the hands and arms of a woman by Cesare da Sesto which, allowing for the fact that the arms in the pictures are partly concealed by sleeves, bear quite a striking resemblance to the style and position of those in the two disputed pictures. The arms in one instance, though not precisely identical, are so similar that it needs comparison to show where they differ. The discovery has confirmed me in the opinion that, in spite of the difficulty of the date, Cesare da Sesto was probably the painter of the two pictures. 103 can be attached to their merely negative assertions. Milan could be easily reached from Basel by the St. Gothard pass or by Chur—the description of the routes by Benvenuto Cellini and by Erasmus reminds us of the fact even if we did not know that the path had been trodden by the feet of scores of Northern artists who made the journey to Italy. The fame of Leonardo and the Milanese school had at the time of Holbein’s sojourn in Basel spread far and wide over Europe. The “Cenacolo” had been finished in 1498 and had already become an object of pilgrimage to painters. In the very first year of the young Holbein’s stay in Basel, Leonardo must have passed through Switzerland, and probably the city, on his journey southwards to Milan, and a year later he must have visited it again on his last journey northwards to France. It is not only possible but surely more than probable that the inspiration of that presence, and the desire to see the works with whose fame the world of art was ringing, should have tempted the artist and his brother in their youth and strength to make the summer journey over the Alps. That probability we may not only concede, but cordially accept, though we cannot ask nor give assurance on such a point. But for evidence of such a visit, so far as any visible and lasting Italian influences are to be traced in the work of this essentially Northern painter of themes which are common both to North and South, we look without result. Some figtree here and there with its foliage cast boldly against a blue sky has encouraged some writers to see Italian influences in Holbein’s work. It is arguing much from little. It did not need a visit to Italy to show Holbein a figtree thrown against a clear sky. It did not need the example of an Italian painter to show him of all men its decorative value when so seen. There is, however, one instance of Leonardo’s influence over the young- painter, or rather, since the picture in question probably includes the handi¬ work of Ambros, let us say painters, which may not be so summarily dismissed. In the Basel Gallery is a large panel representing the Last Supper. I give its catalogue number of that gallery, No. 11 (x), to dis¬ tinguish it from the same subject in the series of five very early Passion pictures on canvas discussed in an earlier chapter. This picture has suffered much from several changes in its shape and its surface. It was once in two parts, as the Amerbach inventory informs us, and had been then joined together to form one picture. The joining was badly done, and at a later period the picture was again taken to pieces and once more reunited. Furthermore, the picture, which now only contains the figures of nine apostles, had once been larger, the two ends having been cut off. These facts are worth stating, as they will at once inform the reader what amount of serious change is likely to have occurred to the surface of the picture at the hands of its manipulators. As a matter of fact, the picture has been largely repainted, and with the somewhat palpable, though 104 doubtless conscientious, intention of making it conform to the Lombard style, in whose spirit it appeared to be conceived. But there is enough to tell us that the central figure has an unquestionable affinity to the central figure of Leonardo’s “Cenacolo.” The Basel picture belongs to the early years of Holbein’s work in that city, and it bears evidence of having sprung from the joint studio of himself and of Ambros. It can claim no high rank amongst the works in which Holbein had a share. It is neither Holbein nor Leonardo; but, as such work is wont to do, it fails to impress us as a really original conception, even had it been a weak one, from either hand would have done. The Saviour’s face is weak and unsatisfying, and wholly without that deeply impressive character which even the wreck of Leonardo’s great work still bears. The overpainting of the picture almost throughout makes it difficult to assert through the evidence of technique which parts may be assigned to Ambros. But I should unquestionably assign to him the slightly caricatured figure of Judas on the left. Still the picture, however unsatisfactory on these various grounds, does give evidence that the young painter had, either from having actually seen Leonardo’s picture, or from having seen copies of it—for there is little difficulty in supposing that among the German artists who returned home through Basel after seeing the great picture some would have brought back records of it—had carried a very clear impression in his mind, which he reproduced in the conception of the Saviour. The fact fails definitely to prove a visit to Italy on the part of Holbein, though it suggests the pro¬ bability, but it does not fail to prove that Holbein on this rare occasion painted in the style of the great Milanese master. Yet another great Italian master remains to be mentioned—Andrea Mantegna, from whom it is generally assumed that influence had passed to Holbein. And this assumption is probably sound, though it would be very difficult indeed to point to any work from the hand of Holbein in which that influence was directly visible. It would be hard to select any single figure in the work of Holbein which betrays anything of the sculpturesque classi- cality which is the keynote of Mantegna’s style. On the contrary, Holbein’s figures, even in the lost wall paintings, so far as we are able to judge, were at all times conceived and executed with a distinct aiming at robust realism. Take for example the Peasant Frieze from the Haus zum Tanz, or the “ Meeting of Saul and Samuel,” or the “ Elders before Rehoboam.” We cannot point to a figure in one of these of which we could say that it is as Mantegna would have made it. Yet in that same subject of Samuel and Saul, and again in the superb drawing at Windsor of the “ Queen of Sheba before Solomon,” and perhaps most of all in the great processional design, the “ Triumph of Riches ” (so far as we can judge of it merely by the sketch and the engraving, which alone remain), we are strongly reminded of 105 p Mantegna’s manner of composition. No doubt the fact that both men are enamoured of Renaissance architecture, ornament, and detail makes the similarity of aim and nature seem stronger than it would, but there can be few who will be able to look at the “Triumph of Riches” without being carried back to the “ Triumph of Julius Caesar.” Here again, however, it is not necessary to insist on a journey to Italy. Mantegna had died m 1506, and a journey to Milan alone would not have shown Holbein that masters great works in colour. But Mantegna’s engravings were widely known among artists, and the engraving of the “Triumph of Julius Caesar” was not so scarce in those days as it has now become. One may quite safely assume that they were known to and admired by Holbein, and one may be also quite ready to believe that they inspired him to see and to design his own great compositions with the same largeness of feeling and the same dignified sense of movement and rhythmical balance. The evidence, therefore, of a visit to Italy is little advanced by our being able to see and acknowledge in Holbein’s works a point or two of contact with the great Italians, since that contact can be accounted for without assuming any such visit. And on the whole, when we have searched the known work of Holbein through and through, and delved in it for Italian influences, even to the parading of the foliage of a figtree as one of the spoils of our quest, we shall surely be impressed with the poverty of the result. Even if we admit the “ Lais ” and the “ Venus,” and add to them the “ Last Supper ” of Basel, a work of his immature period, we have but three pictures in which Holbein has evidently experimented in a style which was not his own. And those experiments, it should be remarked, would establish nothing that can be called an Italian influence which has incorporated itself in the artist’s style so that it runs through it all and tinges it in all its manifestations. On the contrary, you may, as it were, detach these pictures from the man’s work, and no further sign of an influence can be sworn to in any undoubted work of Holbein which we know of. It was not so with the other great German, Albrecht Durer. The Italian influence which showed itself in his works after his first journey to Italy never passed away again from his work. He was less absolutely and uncompromisingly German after it than he had been before. He shows not the curious wish to try his hand in a new style, but an influence visibly absorbed into his own nature. Influence, in the true sense, does not act intermittently and in patches. Experimental imitation of course does. And the question has been worth raising, since when we fairly examine Holbein’s work to discover the evidence on which the statement so often repeated really rests, we shall find once more that Holbein, if ever he came fully within the range of those influences, so completely absorbed them into his own personality that he remained absolutely himself in spite of them. 106 CHAPTER XI PORTRAITS OF ERASMUS W HEN the boy Holbein arrived in Basel and carried his first drawing for the engraver to Hans Froben the printer, he had touched the first link of a chain which was not to be broken until the day when the painter should be laid in his unknown grave in London. For through Froben Holbein was brought into touch with Erasmus. Through Erasmus he had his first introduction to Sir Thomas More, and from that begin¬ ning followed the great English series, the king and his queens, the states¬ men and the courtiers, the poets and the men of letters, the divines and the scholars, the ambassadors and the merchants, the grooms, the maids, and the huntsmen, whose portraits while we look at them seem to people for us that wonderful period with real living beings. Erasmus, as we have already recorded, had arrived in Basel in the same year, 1514, in which the two brothers had left their Augsburg home. He had gone there partly through disgust at the condition of religious feeling in Louvain, where he had been living, partly attracted by the fame of the Basel press, and partly, no doubt, by the restlessness which was part of the nervous activity of the man. He had books on hand which he was anxious to see through the press—his "Adages,” his New Testament, amongst the chief. His name was already familiar throughout Northern Europe to all those— and they were very many—who saw in the New Learning one great hope for the growing enlightenment of the world. To Froben the arrival of Erasmus at Basel must have seemed like the coming of Orpheus. A pretty story is told, true or not matters little, that Erasmus at his first interview with Froben passed himself off as a messenger sent by Erasmus himself to negotiate, but that presently the eagerness of the man got the better of his powers of acting a part, which were never very high, though he was often at pains to improve them, and betrayed him into showing too intimate a know¬ ledge for anyone but the author to possess. Froben, the story goes on, embraced his visitor with tears of gratitude, and sending for his baggage from the inn, compelled him to be guest at his own house, “Zum Luft” in the Fishmarket,^ which lay scarcely two minutes’ walk from the Rathaus Square and from the house of Jakob Meier zum Hasen. Erasmus had in the first ‘ Froben afterwards moved to a house, No. 18 in the Baumleingasse, which descends from the neighbourhood of the Cathedral plateau to the Freiestrasse. Here Erasmus died in 1536. 107 instance no intention of making Basel his abiding place. He was away from it by the end of 1515, and, save for a short visit in 1519, did not return to it until, in the year 1521, he took up his quarters once more with Froben, and became what we must call, for want of a better expression, literary director to the great printing-house. The death of Froben from an accident in 1527 ended a friendship which brings out both men at their best.^ Erasmus, ever in want of money and sometimes peevishly querulous in his demands upon his friends for it, yet speaks always forbearingly of Froben’s dealing with him during his lifetime, and showed unmistakable sorrow at his death. Froben, he says in one of his letters, had made but little out of his work in spite of the thousands of copies that had been sold, and had really paid him as much as he could. And his testimony to Froben’s qualities of kindliness and helpfulness, in a letter written to the Carthusian prior, John Emstedt, comes, one feels as one reads it, genuinely from the heart. Erasmus remained in Basel after the good printer’s death, and left it only after the iconoclastic outbreak, not merely because that incident had shown him that Basel was no longer a place to be at peace in, but also because, as he says in one of his letters, his staying there might seem to argue his approval of what had been done. The description of what took place which he wrote to his friend Wilibald Pirkheimer—the friend also of Diirer, whose engraved portrait of him will at once occur to the reader—has so much bearing upon the possible fate of some of Holbein’s pictures that it is worth quoting at length. “Smiths and carpenters were sent to remove the images from the churches. The roods and the unfortunate saints were cruelly handled. Strange that none of them worked a miracle to avenge their dignity when before they had worked so many at the slightest invitation. Not a statue was left in church niche or monastery. The paintings on the walls were whitewashed. Everything combustible was burnt. What would not burn was broken to pieces. Nothing was spared, however precious or beautiful; and mass was prohibited even in private houses.” We do not gather from anything which Erasmus writes that he had any special affection for Art beyond the sympathy which he felt for it as inseparable from that higher learning which he so ardently believed in as the agency which was to help to bring reform to Europe. His visit to Rome dwelt long in his memory, and he often sighed for the days which were never to be repeated in that atmosphere of art and culture. But it was rather because art went hand in hand with letters and with every other form of culture that he admired it and w'ould have protected it, than because his heart was with it. He loved and probably understood music far better, and was himself a skilled musician. I do not find that either in his letters or in ‘ The portrait of Froben at Hampton Court is discussed in an earlier page. Of this picture another version, now acknowledged to be a copy, hangs at Basel. 108 •.^.1 , •» '^.- ■ iw- • c to ■ m 'm; ft; ^ .■€-,.. ^ « ife' ? 4 v' U T.^S«r ' . « •r^ . « ,'C,“*1! r. JJ ‘ir*' ’■le- *-,f -d I *w rl <*« •V::^ ^■.•^ iv ^ - *^7p’,'- r’^^V ■ • *• _ j.'~''■ —"■* -'♦ ‘>.i» '4 !< • y V/ v^*-. ’■'■*•' - -- ><>4 ■.••'=? VW M SfU r{ .™:„j;;^' - ■'''■-■■ ■■ ?:'',' '^- ■-'-i* -. *--■ HSr • t , .. . ...-. . _ . -T-, y.-- '-<^-' V <;<> ^•:' :A-', g^^ r f. i- *t w ■ : (I ' ».'• ri- - sA ■ V'*,V >v, . I * - I * V .4 r •tv -.Jj r. w* V > 'fO- «. I CV f , n.v y r kll his “ Colloquies” (but I may be mistaken) he mentions any work of art—and yet he must have seen masterpieces by Leonardo and Michelangelo, by Perugino and Raphael, in their first glory—as if it had so entered into his soul that he desired to see it again. Neither do artists seem to have deeply interested him as such, though for the character of Albrecht Dtirer he had the warmest admiration. He mentions Holbein occasionally in his letters, and always with kindness, but without any indication that there was any close intimacy between them, or that he felt any ardent admiration for the art of the young painter whose career he was destined to direct into its final channel. His interests were, indeed, more with letters than with art, and probably even the woodcuts with which Holbein and others adorned his pages were merely regarded by him as the inevitable completion of the printed page, and interesting so far as they expressed again in the engraving what had already been said in the text. On the other hand, though the letter is not preserved, it is evident that when Erasmus wrote to More about the young artist he must have employed more glowing terms than usual, since More replies to him, “your painter must be a wonderful man,” and this expression reads more as if it were evoked by something which Erasmus had written than by More’s knowledge of the portraits of Erasmus which had reached England a year or two before.^ It is strange, by the way, that More does not seem to have known—at any rate he makes no allusion to the fact—that Holbein was the artist who had some eight years before illustrated, in conjunction with Ambros, the third edition of “ Utopia,” which Froben printed at Basel. This negative evidence, if it may be so called, seems to point to the fact that it was not by Erasmus’ influence that Holbein was chosen to illustrate the “ Utopia,” but that it came about in the ordinary way of business through Froben as a part of his duties as a publisher. One can well understand the fascination which the personality of Erasmus would exercise over such a man as Holbein. Erasmus’ first visit to Basel in 1514-15 had not been a long one, and he had lived in Froben’s house as a guest and not as a member of the firm. Holbein, too, was a new¬ comer to the city and a mere boy. There was little opportunity or likelihood of close relationship between the two men, though, as we have already seen, the marginal pen drawings in the “ Praise of Folly” fall within that period. When Erasmus next paid a visit to Basel Holbein was probably absent in Lucerne. And it was not till 1522, when Erasmus had settled in the house of Froben as director of his publications, and when Holbein was now a fully recognized master, that the two men can have met on terms of nearer equality. Holbein’s business dealings with Froben must have taken him continually into the little study or cabinet where Erasmus sat over his ‘ See Froude, “ Life and Letters of Erasmus,” Lecture XVIII. 109 proofs and his manuscripts. By that date Erasmus had become one of the best known figures in Europe. He had outlived the days of poverty and dependence, he had not yet outlived the bright spirits and the quick sympathy with all manner of men which had helped him through those days. His New Testament which Froben had printed had come upon Europe almost as a revelation, and had been read far and wide by men who perhaps would never have troubled to look into it if they had not previously been charmed by the wit and the insight and the knowledge of men and manners that they had found in the “Praise of Folly, the “ Adagia, and the “ Colloquies.” In these days we who look back upon the men who lived in that great century of change may find it hard to understand how Erasmus could have ever been reckoned a greater force than Luther. But we are apt to forget that the many-sidedness of the man, the wide range of his human sympathies, his penetrating humour, which is indeed human sympathy in one of its most concentrated shapes, carried him into the hearts of men who were not to be reached by the single-line earnestness of the other. “ Erasmus laid the egg and Luther hatched it,”^ was the often-quoted saying of that day, and it expresses far more than half a truth. The attitude of the two men towards the great question was wholly unlike. Erasmus stood to all the world as the champion of the New Learning. He believed that he saw in that the force which was to scatter ignorance and darkness from men’s minds, and should make the degradation and superstition which lurked in its shadows impossible alike for monk and man. And to that ideal of his he was as loyal and true as Luther to his. This adherence to an ideal is surely the quality of the man which runs throughout his life like a golden thread, and redeems it from the faults, or rather outweighs all the faults, which not only his enemies, but also his friends, can lay their hands on as they read him in his own confessions. Never was mortal more chameleon-like, taking this colour and that as we turn over his pages and view him under this light or the other. Sometimes, in the days of the needy scholar, as we read a begging letter, we find our pity coming dangerously near to contempt, and then we turn the page to find the same man, to whom money meant so much, since his ill-health made all hardship doubly hard, refusing all fees for his lectures from poor scholars at Cambridge. We find him time after time proclaiming himself —for he was no hypocrite, and the worst and the best about himself come tumbling out together in his pages—as having no taste for any form of martyrdom and discomfort, and yet perpetually taking risks for himself, and boldly taking up the cudgels for the honesty of the unpopular Luther, for whose methods he had no taste and with whose views he was not in ’ Erasmus’ witty rejoinder is well known : “ Yes, but the egg which I laid was a hen’s egg, and Luther has hatched a game cock.” I lO pnx>^ •>. that -cTa-U- ■ ■ - best raoii'fl f ■ fl f.Ui ; H • I'^a-i >' ■ dcp^'a-iiSc’ < ytt v itMvid W- (.• _ ^ * whSdt dai?> H:v. whirh i‘ft>to v'- ■■ w ljil',' h, v; . .^ 1 # -^■^i;i^^ ct.-:o f. ,. V ,.t% ^f.r >’^>-: , ■ .-^V. ■ ,N-t- -, V - " •' " l^oaiW <*■ *HC'n ™ M the- ottst* ’ ■* ^ y < fc i v i» cti te Tv^to^ j. i y^ I# /. r The atovi'V ^}^ Era?i?iS:a v .-■>' '.'"i -a^:-*-. HpUkiiti^wi )tVt( i . ■ " ^•♦.-kifc'.'M, ^*••■ - ■. ■ -V ■. Ni ve^ >ft turtv bu in tMr ai 4 iKtf euwsAifa -lo tciMAH :anT iron ytnnv- 4«V’J0J sympathy. As we read his cynical advice to some correspondent on the way to behave himself if he would succeed in England or in Rome, and to another on the bearing of a courtier, we are inclined to write him down worldling, and to class him some degrees below Polonius, whose morals read far higher; and then we are reminded that he, to whom learned leisure would have meant so much, had refused to be won over by Pope after Pope, from Julius to Paul, setting aside at last the cardinal’s hat and the lordly income that he might still live in the smell of the printer’s ink, and follow his beloved learning whithersoever it might lead him. There must have been in this strange man and in his personality a charm which could be known only to those who had met him—a charm which proved itself equally in the presence of a Julius II. or a Leo X., a Henry VIII. or a Thomas Cromwell, of a More and a Fisher, a Colet and a Grocyn, a Froben or an Amerbach. He was equally at home with all of these, but nowhere more at home, perhaps, than in that little room of Froben’s printing-house where Holbein saw him, and watched him as he wrote, and gave him to us—the actual man himself. We know that two portraits of Erasmus by Holbein had already reached England before the painter came hither himself. These two portraits can be identified almost beyond dispute in the picture which is now at Longford Castle, and which bears the date 1523, and the other which now hangs in the Louvre, having once, as the marks on the back declare, formed part of the collection of Charles I. It is uncertain to whom these portraits were originally sent. The Louvre portrait, which as a work of art is one of the finest of all of Holbein’s portraits, represents Erasmus in profile, and corresponds very closely with the portrait at Basel, which latter was probably the same which Holbein carried to Amerbach, who was then living at Avignon, in 1524. The Longford Castle portrait gives a three-quarters face view, and Erasmus is looking up while he holds an edition of his own works in his hand. A later version seems to have been painted by Holbein in 1530, when Holbein was on his way back from England and found Erasmus living at Freiburg im Breisgau. This portrait, which is a small medallion, and which shows the face very much aged by the wear and tear of the last few years of his life before leaving Basel, is the prototype of many editions which are scattered about Europe. Indeed, the portraits of Erasmus, of which very few indeed came actually from the hand of Holbein, form quite a population, and are an eloquent proof of the popularity both of the subject and the painter. As we look at the two portraits from Longford Castle and from the Louvre,^ we feel that the gift of insight into character, in which no portrait ' The picture at Basel may be taken to be the original study, since it is painted on paper subsequently laid down upon a panel. 111 painter who ever lived has surpassed Holbein, is shown here in its highest perfection. Other men have been able to set down the outward appearance of a man with as much veracity—Frans Hals, for example, could seize the look of the moment with a certainty as convincing—but for subtle and penetrating insight below the surface of a man, for the infallible power of perceiving in the face the character which has been built up in it by the perpetual small additions which a man’s method of thought and action, his manner of life, his temperament, are always making upon the lines of the face—in short, all that is meant by that which has now become almost a cant phrase and yet remains a good one, “ the painting of the soul ”—no man seems to me to have had better equipment than Hans Holbein. And while he seems to give you all that is in a man in a form so convincing that you actually seem to be with the man as surely as if you were sitting face to face with him, yet it seems to have come so naturally and so inevitably that you are at first merely conscious that the man is there ; it needs some effort on your own part to make you try to realize or trouble yourself about the details of the art which put him there. Holbein does not, as some great portrait painters have done, first of all create for himself a vision of the man’s character, his soul, and then paint up to that. He rather goes straight to a face, asks it to tell him what its lines mean, what history is written there of the soul inside it, of the life behind it, sets it all down with simple yet subtle veracity, adds nothing, leaves out nothing, exaggerates nothing, never falsifies a note nor slurs a passage, and yet like some great musician brings out living music for us, where another, no less accurate and no less careful, gives us but a painstaking musical exercise that neither touches nor delights us. As you look at Holbein’s “ Erasmus,” his “ More,” his “ Henry VHI.,” you know that he has given us not only what the men looked like, but what they were. We cannot set the portraits of the sitters beside the living men either in his or in any other artist’s case, but it has happened to Holbein in a degree in which it has happened to no other, to paint the men who were destined to make the history of their own day. It is strange how these men and women whom Holbein has given us lock themselves up in our imagination with their lives, their characters, their fates, so that one can never think of them apart again. They do more than interest us, these portraits of Holbein, they do more than delight us, they do more than satisfy us of their veracity, they live for us. One can say no less and no more. Two woodcut portraits of Erasmus exist from drawing's by Holbein, of which the smaller, a medallion portrait, seems to give us the man at about the same time of his life as the Longford Castle and Louvre portraits, and is so fine and directly simple in its technique that its cutting is generally attributed to the knife of Hans Ltitzelburger, who, dying in 1526, might 112 Si - iri »■ I 4 iV ♦ -V ■t-v 'l • ^* '.*'^ iitvM ^ •»/’ * . / c • h « 1 li . r "^ 4 ^^ • ’I..- ,r*“ ‘ A* ■=i’ y. Hr . - /% « > » <'t ‘ e. > ?•* ji-'-mJ ■ >/'- V <# .*l AtiK • • -• ^.l..-i i ;■■ ■ * )'' »**t r a’ • '•i-.M. '•’WT ■ ■ (Jit. 5 ^: -iv ^— A.■ - . >fe. iSai^-n^-i\f-A 4 ' 1\' » *l » ■ ■ -^ ■»*^ •*’' - 4 -i- *4 -’^4*''^ * **..!% A'.'*..I'l '' -'*#'jj V?. > 1 7 - . ' ^•. *, * . • . . ! • I "■ *./• > ♦. ^ J* ‘V^ * / 1 ^' 1 - V H * * 4 > I- '■^V*-'^' ^ i ' ii * ^' iSL.- iWI ^ ‘ ■ I. *w ic . • * /* ’ • .' v’^' ' V'.gi* i.' ■». itijVV- 'y^- ' '*. .:* J.v< rt * - '.i ^ t •^?rv*r c$rtai^ fV^^fv. givfitt te ,^ffil^a^'iff # ^ i>cot. ^ ma^rtW- ty ^yrc^^ tWp|t 4b' ^<- the li^cn^^ ii^ b t idle; the head of the house governs it not by lofty demeanour and frequent rebukes, but by gentle and lovable manners. Everyone is busy in his place, doing his business with diligence; nor is sober mirth absent.” There is much more in this and in other letters which show us the man and his conversation, his bright and happy ways among children, his fondness for pets, his kindly ways among his servants. It is a picture of simple living and high thinking, drawn by one who knew him in his own home, and adding to it Holbein’s portrait and More’s own writing, and, above all, the record of the man’s own life as it comes to us out of that sad yet splendid page of English history, we seem to know him as we are not privileged to know many of those who bore their part in the great drama. More had been early marked for great things. When he was still “ a beardless youth,” soon after his election to Parliament, he had dared to face Plenry VII. and his agent Dudley and to oppose the imposition of a benevolence on the occasion of the Princess Margaret’s marriage. The king took his revenge, not on young More, but on his father, Judge More, the hearty frosty-faced, gray-eyed old man of the Windsor portrait series. An imprisonment upon another pretext was the judge’s lot, which he presently escaped by payment of a heavy fine. At a later date young More, as Speaker of the House, was again found equal to opposing Wolsey in his projects for raising money, having indeed quite evidently something in him of the stuff of which Hampden and Pym were made in a later age. There was no love lost between More and Wolsey, who, by the way, is also said to have disliked Erasmus. More at that time could have little foreseen that he was destined to witness the fall of the great cardinal, to succeed him as Chan¬ cellor, and himself to fall through an issue arising out of the very same cause—the divorce of Katharine—which had brought Wolsey to his ruin. When More first sat to Holbein for his portrait in 1527 he was not yet Chancellor; but soon after Wolsey was disgraced, in 1529, he succeeded to the office. More could have made little mistake as to the reasons which prompted Henry to promote him to honour. He must have known his danger well, since he knew both himself and Henry well. The king might drop in upon him in his house at Chelsea, as a man drops in upon his friend, and stay to dinner; he might walk in More’s garden with his arm affectionately about the Chancellor’s neck, but More knew better than any¬ one else that the head which was enfolded so lovingly by the king’s arm would fall if ever Henry had aught to gain by it. Henry never could really have liked More. So far back as the day when the “Utopia” was published. More in its pages had read a lecture to kings, and, by inference, to Henry among them. Henry had seemed to approve, or, at any rate, to forgive and to forget. I doubt if he ever forgot any wound, even the slightest, to self. However little he might seem to be aware of what was passing, no monarch 117 who ever sat on a throne was keener to notice and more tenacious to remember any act of, or any bearing in any man which seemed to savour of a wish to dictate to or to rule him, to handle him, or to model or to shape him to any purpose but his own. No man could less brook a rival or an equal. And to lecture him implied superiority. Henry knew, too, that More had not feared to thwart his father’s minister once, and his own minister more than once ; he would do so again at any moment. But Henry knew his worth as an ally and his value also as an opponent. The character and opinion of such a man was, if he could be won over, in itself a valuable asset. More was not in the ordinary sense a popular man, since he had never cultivated the arts which make men popular. He cared nothing for the Court and its ways. Strenuous and effective in his public life, he lived his own private life in his own way, amidst his books and his children and the little circle of staunch friends of tastes that matched his own. Yet no man’s good word was better worth having, and no man’s support to a cause was better worth earning. If Henry could make sure of winning More’s support to the divorce he removed from his path one whose opposition could not be weighed by setting against it in the balance the compliance of half a hundred courtiers. And the favours which Henry heaped upon him were, and More knew it, merely an experiment on the part of one who had not yet learned to the full the lesson in more direct methods which Cromwell was presently to school him to. But More was neither to be bought nor bent, and when, after less than three years of office, the experiment had failed, and More, whose attitude towards the divorce remained unchanged, had felt himself compelled to resign the Chancellor¬ ship, he must have forecast the future possibilities of fate clearly enough to himself. We need not follow him to the scaffold. His refusal to sign the double clause of the oath which declared Henry to be the supreme head of the Church and the marriage with Katharine illegitimate, involves questions which cannot rightly be discussed here. But that More had kept faith with his own conscience and had preserved to the end the character of a high-minded, fearless and chivalrous English gentleman no one, of whatsoever faith or politics he be, will be found to deny. When Holbein painted the author of “ Utopia,” which, as we have said, Holbein had illustrated years before, More was about fifty-one years old. There are two drawings at Windsor, one of which seems to be some years later than the other. The first of the two, which may be considered the original study for the oil portrait in the possession of Mr. Huth, convinces one at the first glance of its lifelike fidelity. The clear gray eye, showing, as Erasmus remarked, that very small pupil “which in England is accounted to be one of the signs of genius ; ” the finely-curved brow arch, from under which the glance comes as penetrating and dauntless as of some eagle; the ii8 firm fine line of the mouth, grave set by habit, and yet ready to break into a smile; all this goes together to give us the face of the man in whom and in whose life strength and tenderness, humour and pathos, laughter and tears, lay close together. The light brown hair straggling from beneath the cap, the complexion sallow and almost pallid, agree with what Erasmus tells us. Holbein tells us further, by the redness round the eyes, that the man he was drawing was a student. There are many instances in which, as we look from Holbein’s pre¬ liminary studies in chalk to his finished oil picture, we find ourselves as fully satisfied with the former as the latter. And this is not always due, though it often is, to the fact that the oil painting has entirely escaped the hand of the restorer, but rather to the fact that Holbein in these studies gives us absolutely all that Art can give or ask. That he gives it sometimes in the form of a suggestion, leaving the imagination to take it on from the point to which he has led us, makes it not less but more delightful. We share, as it were, the vision of the painter because he takes us into his confidence, and treats us as if we must know and sympathize with all that he saw and felt. And his seeing and feeling embraced all that was in the man. He sees through the face of a man as if he were looking through a glass window that opened to the soul. As you turn over the Windsor drawings^ you seem to sit beside and look into the same face as he looked into. But you would not perhaps have seen all that he saw in them. He is to you what the great artist must ever be, the interpreter, the artist as “seer,” as Carlyle would have told us if he had admitted painters to his hierarchy at all. And yet he does it so simply and so inevitably that you are convinced that he is setting down exactly what he saw. It is the power of his seeing that seems to awake in you some corresponding power. The earlier of the two portraits is pricked along the leading lines for transfer to a panel by the familiar means of pouncing, that is, of dusting coloured chalk through the pin pricks, the result, since the dusting must in delicate works take place from behind, being a reversed portrait. This pricking is of no small interest, because it shows us what lines Holbein considered absolutely indispensable to his portrait. They are briefly as follows : The outline of forehead and cheek against the background, the line of the division of the lips (not the thickness of the lips), the nose, nostril and curve of the depression between lip and nostril, the angle of the eye¬ brow, and exact line of the upper and lower eyelids. Also the wrinkles ' These priceless possessions are in the Royal Library at Windsor. Most of them have been exhibited to the public more than once in the last thirty years—for example, at the Winter Exhibition of Old Masters at Burlington House in 1880. and at the Tudor Exhibition, 1890, and on other occasions. II9 under the left eye. The drawing, though of the broadest and simplest, is yet full of subtle observation. One needs to examine it somewhat exactingly in order to see how Holbein has observed and set down with unerring decision, and yet with the loveliest tenderness of line, those very minute curves and changes in the direction of a line which help to make the difference of characteristic in this face or in that, and which added all together make each human face individual and standing apart, in spite of apparent likeness, from all other human faces. That is how he handles the leading lines of the face. The modelling within these lines is produced in the broadest manner, sometimes by washes of tint so subtly modulated as to tell everything to the eye, and yet to seem to the careless glance almost like an uniform tint. No reproduction, however excellent, can fairly be asked to deal fitly with this modelling, since a comparatively uniform and always over-black surface results. Where Holbein has rubbed, apparently with his finger and thumb, black or coloured chalk upon the surface to produce the modelling of the face, the reproduction has a better chance. But no one can thoroughly understand the extraordinary beauty of these preliminary studies —there are over eighty at Windsor alone—who has not lovingly examined the originals. Holbein’s method with regard to portrait seems to have been established from the outset, and to have varied very little. He made a clear and decisive sketch in chalk of considerable size on white paper. This paper during his English period at any rate, was a tough-looking material showing the horizontal wire marks. Holbein appears to have soaked this before¬ hand in body colour, often of a pinkish tint, and I am inclined to think that he sometimes subjected it before using it to strong pressure, since the wire marks are often flattened out in the middle of the paper,' but are more visible at the edges. In some cases, however, as in the “ Lady Parker ” and the “ Sir Harry Guildford,” the paper has been used without any prepara¬ tion. The leading lines are drawn in red or black chalk,^ more often the former, and every essential detail is inserted to the neglect of all unessentials, so that the drawing shall hereafter, with the aid of the artist’s mind, act to him as a perfect record of all that made up the man. The details of dress are similarly reckoned with. The general or universal facts, such as the fall of a fold, the texture of a fur, the droop of a feather, are loosely and slightly indicated. They can be recovered or supplied at any moment. But the special facts which give the dress of the man or the woman its individuality, so to speak, are carefully noted. Thus a very small portion, just an inch or two, of the embroidery about a lady’s throat, or the jewelled border of her coif,-will be drawn with exquisite and accurate care; or the design of the pendant which droops to her breast will be carefully indicated, since Charcoal seems also to have been used. 120 SIR THOMAS MORE WINDSOR CASTLE i ..»ieh c-c .' .- v ririi ot^>Libti^^.Gn»at:r 4 j- t*c« iweili H-■ d--' ' in Oi^i^ Vr Not fes£>«* ^ ^ --<■ a^i yife Ow li^.r?-- .•^-* •- rhaii;i'ti 7 in U;c d.i>: .y? « Ite '.^*>.>4 c.Av ^ ftfc>iara<:tcnsticini>*:s.?ji3e-.;^h?t^a4'iRT^^''4f? ^C1 ^ - >* a«.c eaJi hu^tuu Uce A^Cid ^ssaBsdSijg^ .- • ^ iitfn«f;s, ffiv,n ail (Jfhsaf fj«efL TPWfc'Sj fcwfr iM t?,'^’5 of The rrvsddSm^' ^ ^•roiiawt »>¥. ipv-f: r.» tcH to tfef v . v.:^ v-c^ Ji,- >.• ;:at No T mw:rJ}i^;^^ smO? |» <«ifptWS»*W?>.#ft;f-»; i' :tj.d - r>v^A^U: \ >afiaivrtettlis. WTicre his? . 1,^-1 cr,u\ .i. :> in- ^Th^r .ifuj ihvmb, ijJarg or cr^Urtir^d tls^k u> ■- i^r _ -..ct- ^ n^rxldlia^ (rf ths face, Uie rcpr*^\rctio» hh~. ^ f-tt.u .:; But r^o v; - ■ tfe'.it-itujfMy undeisiandthoextrac5M(3sar;^’l-ts. rj ■,ii»?-> > ^dfr?5!r/ar.- ^..1 - —^ben« art- ovet eighty -it vV'mcU. r .\iooc— •sk'h^- v:! '.:yt >:?^*K ev .r- ;^ tiie cri^^mal^ ndU'ir s ir^duxi with ro^ard to p-trUjit SifcmrN U; ^vc LK-^n c : ; . - ., irom iht: outvs-.t, aad to huvu varied very liitie. He naadc 4 clc:v ticciiivc Sictii: rr: -thalk tT resj^uSej-^ibk on white )i?.ycr. Thi 5 --.u < n^hl^ F.r,-!--= -'r-*? iMm :>t:-,w;.sa toug^h-if-oting eiatcrUi the ‘ -VTft: ^^■. 1 :*... > . ;>.sirs to Iiav« soaked thv-> bcl x-^ iuiid ia it-is^and I zxn inclined to iuiXik t^w hi: vomut>st> 4 ^ ^ Tt t*> prcsMJix, smee tho *vfr- ?na:k* «c <■;». o thr H'i^^iic tT tJii: paper, mH are Triofe It 1 ^ bc-WCvrr. r. r i'** J ^^Jy P;,r(CCr ***^1 i^ ■" i -"ry i. 4 i' * ivt> tjcer- .>.; j any p)repit!S' 7t^4lidbk«i ri -'t »-i ,-^tO .-.f J kuri mote often thr Hu ntgfru of all une^'^'^ntiaU - - ■ V ? sh;? -.ys .J< A*; artist's n;hjd, net t( : i v:- 'U>: w *>:- 7'liedcUi'Js of da-^ w v-:’V:'W fai.Vi, such as ihr fife - * andsl'^MlH ^ /> V r '•v^♦ '4. > ;?■ t-. W.;-:•*>, -^ri .,:• ' s\*a t»»? •'=- 4 .. rj. :ls i!vl(>jJiixPtK p*.» t^»15^. ;p- '. ■i.,:‘-A a Wi ?'«>j N HMOM 2AM0HT HI& SJTSAO iJOR«£>4 ii£ats wftf be foond «*&rt< l lt l ^V!W* j a j^.», or jf.dcy:ewjr saat^:4£. . ? f ? ■ ^ - a£l*M«e'4ii ' i*sss.^^- ;4l^. j(|i«d5«':iiyfs '59 « of ateC ^ '■' /oaan Yja:)io auT 4 A:> ji 08 «isiw period of Holbein’s life which we have to imagine to fit the circumstances, when he had become King’s Limner, and when Fisher and More and many another were already dead of the king’s displeasure, that he would be likely to want their sketches again for future use to paint from them. And if he had foreseen such an use for them, chalk would have served his purpose well enough. I suggest that this strengthening by Indian ink took place when the drawings came into the hands of Charles I. By that time they were probably seriously rubbed, and very faint of outline. It was not an incapable hand that was employed upon the task. Far less has been lost than might have been if the work had fallen into quite unsympathetic hands. If my sur¬ mise is correct as to the date of the work, the name of Wenceslas Hollar the engraver occurs to me as one to whom the task might have been assigned. He was in England in the early days of Charles, and the task was one which an engraver well used to making water-colour copies of the works which he was to engrave might have consented to undertake. At the same time, I cannot pretend to attach much weight to the surmise, especially as we have nothing to show that the strengthening in question did not take place at some previous date, possibly while the drawings were in France in the hands of a dealer. A note in Mr. Wornum’s edition of Walpole’s “Anecdotes ofPainting”^ is of great interest on this question. It refers the reader to a MS. in the British Museum which has in it the following passage: “I shall not need to insist on the particulars of this manner of working (crayons), it shall suffice, if you please, to take a view of a booke of pictures by the life, by the incomparable Hans Holbein, servant to King Henry VIII. They are the pictures of most of the English lords and ladies then living, and were the patterns whereby that excellent painter made his pictures in oyl: and they are all done in this last manner of crayons. I speak of and knowe of many of them to be miserably spoyled by the injury of tyme, and the ignorance of some who formerly had the keepinge of the book, yet you will find in these ruinous remaines an admirable hand, and a rare manner of working in few lines and no labour in expressing of the life and likenesses many times equal to his own oyl pictures and excelling other men’s. The book hath been long a wanderer: but is now happily fallen into the hands of my noble lord the Earl Marshall (the Earl of Arundel) of England, a most eminent patron to all painters who understood the arte: and who therefore preserved this book with his life till both were lost together.” There is obviously no small obscurity about the last paragraph. It is, however, plain that the words were written after the death of the sixth Earl of Arundel, the great collector, which happened in 1645, and the ‘ Voi. i., p. 84. 123 wording of the paragraph leaves the impression that the event was not quite recent. The contradiction involved in the two statements that the book “is now happily fallen into the hands” of the Earl of Arundel and that he had lost it and his life together is beyond my power to explain. But the assertion that the drawings were injured by time, and by the ignorance of former keepers, seems in the latter half of it to suggest some ignorant method of dealing with them over and above the injuries of time, and it may well refer to the reinforcing of Holbein’s lines by an inferior hand. Of Holbein s technical methods after the transference of the drawing to panel we have no evidence, save that which may be obtained from the appearance of his pictures. In one or two instances, where cracks are occurring in the surface, as in the “ Robert Chambers” at Vienna, caused often by shrinking of the panel in the over dry air of museums, it is unhappily possible to ascertain that Holbein prepared his panel with a thin coating of white gesso. I should estimate the thickness of the preparation at about one-twentieth of an inch. We have no clear evidence, so far as I know, of the method which Holbein followed in the preliminary stages of his painting, but it may be taken as practically certain that he followed the practice of the earlier painters—with whom his technique has more affinity than it has with those who follow him—in laying in his picture in mono¬ chrome brought to a high finish. If we may accept “The Man of Sorrows” and the “ Mater Dolorosa” of Basel as pictures brought up by Holbein to a certain stage with the intention of finishing them in colour, then we may say that the monochrome ground was a warm one, and most artists would probably, after examining the finished pictures of Holbein, give their verdict in favour of his having used a warm ground for the preliminary stages of his work. But I do not know of any picture by him which is in such a condi¬ tion as to give us definite information on this point. Of all the cultivated men who sat to Holbein, from Erasmus onwards, not one was sufficiently interested in art, or had sufficient prophetic insight into the future fame of the artist to leave us just the few lines of information which would have been of such value to us. 124 ELIZABETH DANCEY (WRONGLY CALLED LADY BARKLY) WINDSOR CASTLE F ^ itaves thnf - - 1^-^.; ■Vtr', taAr" i vtt b3ts^o-«vis fa the^tK<^tot’Cf‘ih!bm*kt oftan hjr sbtisifeing ef tie panel in tbe over 9^ tiii»e»@5s^ unltappil>- pniaitjk ta .ascertain- that Holbdha fai^rdlsie fahef wssif eoadnf'tif white gt&ax 1 aiiould estimate at afcwt cs>o-tw®?tkb of afi indL We ba^ t^ tte; ^ bnow, of sIk teiafcod wbkh HolMfi : his pajawn^: ^ci#atey be taken as pfactfcaili/-fcES«f ^rSet palaters-^ith wlvjis Hfe id5*w*.< ftsi^sds?! fcflovF hira—tn SAtsb. ;fJ^ my aeeept SnishiTig theift ^ warm one, aad ap^awfe' ststfe- W*i-'5iy6fe ^*4^- ^ ^#(85&Rif imgBtes of " i h^ste gimfstd for' Ui« pf^iisEoi^ ; re byhimwbich is b* this pwBS. Of a£) rtw ;-< iVi^ firiatetet emwartb. not one ^ >- ‘Jttt«evu$ £b ^R;hrleid iuEid^t fwof^Jetic insight into the tehb^' "fib arttef W^ewe at; just the few Uaes of iitformation tfWcfc l|iib kaltKthas, CidAHAs YQAj aajjAO YJBvion'/f) vaanAQ iixaaASija* xaraf^o horuxtw SA ANNE CRESACRE WINDSOR CASTLE CHAPTER XIII OTHER PORTRAITS OF THE FIRST ENGLISH PERIOD, 1526-28 B ESIDES the separate portraits of Sir Thomas More and his children, Holbein is known to have completed a group of the family which has disappeared, though a small preliminary sketch or arrangement is in the collection at Basel, having been apparently sent over by Sir Thomas More, or carried by the hands of Holbein on his return thither, for his friend Erasmus. The various members of the group have their names written upon them in, it is said, Sir Thomas More s handwriting, while notes and memoranda in Holbein’s hand appear in parts of the drawing and show us that the sketch was undoubtedly intended as a guide for a finished group. In the centre of the picture sits Sir Thomas More himself, easily recog¬ nizable by the gold chain which he wears (sometimes wrongly described as the Chancellor’s chain, but he was not yet Chancellor when this sketch was made, nor when the portrait nowin the possession of Mr. Huth was painted. At Sir Thomas’s left hand stands his son, John More, and a little further back, near the door, Henry Pattenson, More’s jester, who probably filled other offices in More’s simple household. Directly under Pattenson sits Cecilia Heron, More’s daughter, and in front of her Margaret Roper, “ myne own good daughter,” as More wrote her in that touching last letter which he sent the day before his death. It was she who was with him almost to the last, and broke the hearts of the halberdiers by her weeping, and who was allowed by grace of the king to receive her dead father’s body for his burial. The other favour which Henry had spontaneously granted was that More, like Fisher, should be beheaded rather than hanged—a favour that drew from More the hope that God would spare all other of his relations from any more such royal favours. Behind Margaret Roper, and on the extreme right of the picture, sits Alice, More’s second wife—the little woman who, according to Erasmus, was neither young nor beautiful. At Sir Thomas More’s right hand sits his father, Judge More, next to whom the woman holding a book is Margaretha Gigs, afterwards Clement, who had been brought up in More’s household. On the extreme left is More’s daughter, Elizabeth Dancy; while the young girl in the background between More and his father is Anne Crisacre, who became the wife of young John More. 125 The family monkey, not, I presume, the same which Erasmus knew, but a successor, is not forgotten. Original drawings exist of SirThomas More, Judge More, Anne Crisacre, Cecilia Heron, Elizabeth Dancy (wrongly named the Lady Barkly), and John More, all in the Windsor collection. With regard to John More I am inclined to believe that the oil painting by Holbein in the Louvre of a young man unknown represents John More at a later date. The drawings of the More family are of the very finest quality, and are evidently wrought by Holbein with his full strength—diploma works, indeed, by which he knew he would be judged, and by which he must stand or fall at the outset of his career in his newly-adopted country. That they fully satisfied those who knew the More family best is shown by the fact that during these two years of his first English visit nearly all his sitters came from the circle of More s friends, or from among those whose tastes and positions brought them into contact with him. Foremost amongst these must be reckoned John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, who, though not so intimate a friend of More as Colet or Warham, yet will go down to history more closely linked with his name, since he died the same death for the same cause some fourteen days earlier in that same summer of 1535. John Fisher was a very different type of man from More—Holbein’s portrait would have told us that if history had not done so. He had indeed few traits in common with the writer of “ Utopia” except his sincerity and his love of learning. The wit, the large outlook upon mankind, the quick sympathy which belonged to More were not in Fisher any more than they were in Warham. But he was honest and of blameless life and character. He had been confessor to the Lady Margaret Beaufort, and had given to her two noble Cambridge foundations, the Colleges of St. John’s and Christ’s, the con¬ stitution which, in a modified shape, they still enjoy. To Katharine of Aragon also he had been confessor—the only adviser, she once said, on whose sincerity and honesty she could rely—and probably the bold front which he always bore towards the question of the divorce had something in it of personal chivalry as well as of religious conviction, and we do not like him the less for it. His language on the point was always fiercer and more unequivocal than that of More. In this very year when Holbein made the drawing which we see at Windsor, namely, on June 28th, 1529, the brave old bishop had appeared before the Legate’s Court to urge that the marriage could not be dissolved by any power divine or human. With equal vehemence he proclaimed against the royal supremacy over the Church. If it was accepted, he said before Convocation, it would cause the clergy of England to be hissed out of the society of God’s Holy Catholic Church. It would have been well for him if he had ended his life with that protest, but he lived to bear a foolish share in the celebrated imposture of Elizabeth 126 ARCHBISHOP WARHAM WINDSOR CASTLE Barton, the Nun of Kent, who gave his name to the council as one of her abettors. Unhappily Fisher defended himself as doggedly in this case, where he was palpably in the wrong and should have wisely admitted it, as he had done in the other cases. One may see, perhaps, in that face as Holbein has shown it to us, something which tells us of a man who would never willingly do wrong, but who would be equally unwilling to admit that he had done it. Happily it was not to be his fate to suffer for his share in that foolish and superstitious piece of business. He was once more called to face the questions of the supremacy of Henry and the legitimacy of the marriage of Katharine, and no one who knew the nature of the old man could have doubted of his answer. The madness of Pope Paul, who chose that moment for sending him a cardinal’s hat, hastened, though it hardly produced the end. Henry’s oath, that he should soon lack a head to wear it on, was speedily and faithfully kept. There is no picture in English history more piteous and yet more noble than that of the old bishop of eighty years mounting the scaffold—going to his wedding, as he gaily called it—to die a traitor’s death. Holbein’s drawing of the old bishop—the Windsor drawing is far finer than that which is in possession of the British Museum—is a miracle of intuition. No one can suppose that Holbein, a new-comer to England, little acquainted with English politics, and with little knowledge of the texture of religious questions in the country, could have had much to guide him from without to the character of the man. His guide was, in this case as always, the face of his sitter. And how he has read the man! with his pale bloodless face, his thin determined lips, his eager bright gray eyes full of nervous alertness. It is a very honest, very spiritual, but very obstinate old face. One can almost see as one looks at it the smile of scorn rising about the lips, and the flash of battle lighting the old eyes as it did that day when old Warham, ever ready with the argument from expediency, tried to convert him to the divorce and warned him that “Ira principis initium mortis est.” One turns from the portrait of the one man to the portrait of the other and finds once more that our interpreter has not failed us. Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, was a man of a very different stamp from either More or Rochester. He had neither the keen wit and the high intellect of the one, nor the unflinching stubbornness of the other. He had spent a long life in harness and had been Chancellor of England until he gave place to Wolsey, for whom, indeed, he was no match either in intellect, or subtlety, or statecraft. He was the type at once of the successful ecclesiastic and of the respectable statesman. In both departments his abiding policy had been expediency, and in following that policy he had merely succeeded in being one of those who wait behind opportunity to see which way she is going, and then, having lost sight of her, remain 127 where they were. He could never have taken his place in the ranks of the reformers, yet he utterly failed, having hardly half attempted it, to bar their progress. He was the friend and constant companion of Colet and of More, whose minds were full of the dream of moral and intellectual reform in the Church. Yet he stirred no finger, much as he loved learning for its own sake, to advance that side of reform which might even at that late moment have saved the fabric whose safety he desired. He must, one would have thought, through their conversation have realized the danger to the Church that sprang from the corrupt condition of the spiritual courts which were in his hands. And here again he stirred no finger, so that at no time was the corruption greater. So, too, in his dealings with Henry, he sought to save his ship by jettison of its cargo, and he lived long enough to know that he had cast away both cargo and ship. There is something very pathetic in the paper written when the old man lay broken-hearted and dying, in which he protests—now that all protest is futile and that the time for it is long past—against any statutes which shall be “ in derogation of the Pope of Rome or of the Apostolic See, or be to the hurt, prejudice, or limitation of the powers of the Church, or shall tend to the subverting, enervating, derogating from or diminishing the laws, customs, privileges, etc., etc., of our Metropolitan Church of Canterbury.” It is well to turn from Warham’s public acts to his private life, in which we find traits which easily explain to us how he came to be the friend of such men as Colet and of More. He was a lover of learning and generous to all scholars who needed his help—Erasmus, for example, received from him presents of £io, large sums in those days. He was hospitable and charitable, keeping open house to rich and poor to his own impoverishment, so that at his death there was scarcely enough money for his burial, and all the while he was himself living a most simple and frugal life, hardly even tasting wine at his own table. He was kindly to all men, provided they were not heretic or unorthodox, in which case he was capable of the same severities which Fisher and More found themselves able to approve. No reproach was uttered against his manner of life. Erasmus indeed adds the praise which sounds quaintly in our ears to-day, that he “neither hunted nor diced.” It might not occur to a modern biographer to catalogue these among the virtues of a primate. A better testimony perhaps is to be found in the fact already quoted, that he was the intimate friend and companion of men of such character as Colet and More. The drawing of Warham, at Windsor, from which two oil portraits were painted, the one now in the Louvre collection, the other in Lambeth Palace, ranks amongst the most masterly even of Holbein’s drawings. In the rendering of such a face with its strongly-marked detail, an old 128 man s JOHN FISHER, BISHOP OF ROCHESTER WINDSOR CASTLE where they H« could itever have laJ«g ^ - refomarv yet he utterly tailed, lariag bai4Jj^^ ^ theif j K Cj g» eta >. He was the ftiend and ocwsiicfii .« < Mcr^ W^Kse miuds were fuD of the dreasi of^MKa^ - in the Otoreh. Vci he’slirmi so hr^er, towcii owe stkti, to advance that »*de of «fona wfiiefe ’Tint^t -hUr _^rocmiehi hat'e saved tie itbric wiaa^ A*fety "he ^ '“'^woeld cioi^ithrOU^'iJ^rx»iveH^enou^ 4o’¥»ow sJmiS -fc had or# way hoB* cMgo "JJteB; ® wwwtlving {Hit^oik in the written when ttie hid h^iaf ^j|^ a!»d dyai^. in which he protests^now that aB i- n««l iMt w time for (i is ioRg part—«^;ain5t sny suxuteswhicr< Au&'lif. ^;'.> iVrrtnarrin of the Pt^ at »r of the Apostolic See, or he o>=^ prj^aithBe^ or of the powere c^ the Church, at sKaU habl wliiee winauN^ enrrvaiutg, deregating from or rfiiaraishing the laws. etc, etc., ofpar MeirojXsJitaa Chttpch of Canterbury ' U it weti to tqrn hmn Warhata’s public acts Ui^Jm ■ wh*d) we Sud traits wbieh euBiiy eaplaiu to us how he csot c ^ Crieoil «4 sudt mtai mCokt aaj of Mor£' He was a lover of Irwr.-ru^ |cnuaci> » u8 fdatow wi«» wesM hes Iti^p—Erasmiia i» wtemd froUft Imu ^rrrwTahi »f i^ao, largeS 3 ito la thissi He wa'i hswptRrt’f* aryj cfeasSMJik,. 1^^ houa to ri eaoogfi w.siey hu im tfc s^lie btw^ Htenself living a most siropk aad thu^ hu. y«u^ey«ji wi^e dm table.. He vrag kindly toaU wiocj o« ut^ ia wKkh case he ftSsciKafefe ot taeisaus'scysrtfe t^srJk and Mesefouwd the{t>«i^vK$ ios stwied agsumt his. manat-r wf gfe. Bwaau* ioitaii 4 ^ ilw jOauw sndieh iw«6ds qtiai(itiy1i«x»r wk* Io-iU/^ U»« be ".neisbfZ hvntt4 net tri * ^ ' ■#?»»■ IT I- • Mi-iV ‘ ■y’} f. ... . '■'^ I'CK' v«*. ■-f'f- •-' _ S' * -'"r.r ■ ►.'r^.t' •<^ • ■•fe t-‘. _ 4*^ * t ' ■ vrp>'v ^--^r- w L ,ic** v-!*,, ?V1 f 6r, • \ >«>■ rV.I ;v ^■ X i 5 : r? ’■'•‘f-' ■ ■' .'tl ■ . *-.' kv - •.‘ 4 ^. ■ t* * ViiJ'''' t ■> .t' iw(r .- /-■' K • i* • Y • “ ‘S* •♦ ‘V* • • *# .' !•< ■JL^ ^ - .;, t -y^/i-. .'fV ’■• I -'*: V. ^ ‘ii * ..* ''-i‘ t. face which time and the battle of life had furrowed and wrinkled, there was the temptation to which not only lesser artists easily yield, but to which even greater artists were liable, Diirer himself, for example, of giving us too much a map of wrinkles and furrows, and of allowing the superficially striking marks of the features to assert themselves so loudly that they express only the facts common to all old age, and fail to tell us much about the individuality of the particular old man. Diirer, as we have said, allowed himself, especially in some of his engraved portraits, to be so carried away by the technical pleasure of wreathing the face of his old men in wrinkles which were amusing to draw and gave great opportunities of interesting line work, that character is really lost, not gained, by the process. You are apt to get a most skilful, but somewhat imaginary maze of surface markings, enjoyable for the sake of the engraved line, but often obliterating the very traits of character which you want to get at in the portrait. It becomes, in fact, rather a map of old age than a living likeness of an individual old man. Holbein does nothing of the kind. He gives you, indeed, the wrinkled texture of the somewhat sallow and leathery skin of the old man, but he does not set you thinking merely of skin and wrinkles, but rather of the somewhat pachydermatous old nature that lay below it. The eyes are weary and heavy, and there is a look of pathetic sadness in the face. One may well believe that the old man wore it at that time. It was so that he was seen, one doubts not, when he heard that his enemy the great cardinal had put some fresh slight on the privileges of his beloved see of Canter¬ bury—it was so that he looked when he heard that men had plastered the walls of his own cathedral with gibes at the subservient old man. He wore that same look, doubtless, during those three days of doubt and distress when he presided over the meeting of Convocation which was to save itself and the clergy from the penalties of praemunire by agreeing to a fine of a full million of money to Henry, and by what was to most the still greater penalty of pronouncing him “only supreme head of the Church.” It was he who devised the saving compromise “ so far as the law of Christ permits,” which on the fourth day enabled that dejected assembly to agree. “ He who is silent seems to assent,” cried the old archbishop to his speechless audience. “ Then are we all silent,” was the only answer given by a single voice in the crowd, and Warham must have known that he had both won and lost. We cannot see the other actors in that scene, unless it be by a glimpse of the pale face of Fisher in the crowd, for Holbein painted them not, but this one figure of Warham, as he sat before that great gathering, how instinct with life it becomes to us as we look at the portrait 1 It was a much more difficult piece of interpretation which was set to the painter when he was asked to read and discover to us the inward texture of that nature, than it was when he sat before the face of a More or a Fisher, 129 s The result might so easily have been so commonplace. The texture of such a character as Warham’s is so much more made up of what it is not than of what it is. And it is so far more difficult to paint the absence of qualities than their existence. It was easier to paint something of that look which flashed from the imaginative eyes of More than it was to give us the life- history of this kindly and dignified, but stolid, phlegmatic, and spiritually hide-bound old ecclesiastic. The Louvre portrait differs from the Lambeth version chiefly in some details of colour—the curtain being green instead of brown behind Warham’s head, and the eeneral tone somewhat colder. It is to be noticed that the Louvre picture is somewhat drier and less limpid in its surface qualities than many of Holbein’s works. The details, such as the embroidery of the vestments and the ornaments of the mitre and the crozier, are carried out with the same sense of delight which is always visible in the painter’s work. The colour is greatly helped by the little patch of scarlet which is visible in the archbishop’s cassock beneath the white surplice, and there are throughout passages of refined and delightful colour which seem to have come there as accidents arising from the vestments themselves, but are, of course, the result of most subtle calculation. It is noticeable, as has been already said, that during the painter’s first visit to England, 1526-1528, his portraits are almost exclusively confined to those whom we know to have been of the circle of the intimate friends of More, or those who were by their tastes and pursuits likely to have been in touch with him and with Erasmus. And when this supply was exhausted, we do not find that sitters from the Court at large, still less from the immediate circle of royalty, were added to the list. It would seem, there¬ fore, that though Henry was at this time showing favour to More, and was at times even seen at the house in Chelsea, he was not sufficiently struck by what he saw of Holbein’s work to feel any desire to employ his services. The fact carries with it the further suggestion that Holbein was not, as has been asserted, under More’s roof, and that, therefore, probably the only portrait which Henry could have seen there was that of More himself,^ the large family group not being completed till just before Holbein returned to Basel in 1528, and therefore visible only in the painter’s studio. I must not claim too much for this argument, but it seems to me, so far as it goes, to be suggestive. The identity of the drawing which bears the name of Colet at Windsor is not beyond dispute, and no finished portrait of the dean by Holbein exists wherewith we may compare it. The drawing, whether it be of Colet or no, is less desirable than many of the series, partly because it represents the figure sitting at half-length, and therefore the face is reduced in scale, ‘ This is probably the portrait now in possession of Mr. Huth. 130 whereby we lose some of the force which we find in the larger drawings. On the other hand, the study at Windsor for the portrait of Sir Harry Guildford is of the highest quality.^ The finished picture is also at Windsor, and has been more than once exhibited in the last forty years. Sir Harry Guildford was, like many an English gentleman in that great century, a man of no small versatility. He was Master of the Horse to Henry VIII., and as such was a man of prowess in outdoor sports. He was one of the king’s retinue on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and he jousted at the marriage of Katharine of Aragon, and he was withal a scholar and a man of letters and of art, the friend and correspondent of Erasmus. He had the good fortune to take no marked place in politics. It must be admitted that the portrait gives us more the idea of the bluff and burly man of sport than of the thoughtful man of letters. But as helping us to fill up the picture to ourselves of one of those who stood high in the early days of Henry, and was one whom the king delighted to honour, this portrait, though it lacks the historical interest of the “ More,” the “ Fisher ” or the “Warham,” is of no small value. So, too, from the drawings of Sir Thomas Elyot, another of More’s friends, and of Lady Elyot—man and wife, indeed, passed away out of royal favour soon after More’s execution, it is said, because of their intimacy with More and their supposed community of view—we obtain a sight of a cultivated English lady and gentleman whose life knew no reproach, and whose house escaped both taint and disaster, a rare thing to be able to say of those who had moved freely in the Court of Henry. In the Louvre hangs the portrait of Nicholas Kratzer, a German of Munich, which also belongs to this first English period. He was astronomer to the king. We know his salary from the account books—it was ^25 a year, the same sum that was paid to Henry’s French cook—and he succeeded in holding the office for thirty years without, it is said, learning as many words of English. If this be true, Holbein’s company must have been a godsend to the poor astronomer, who could have found few companions of kindred tastes among the German merchants of the Steelyard, and who must have had to fall back upon conversation in Latin, as Erasmus had had to a great extent to do when he met with a Colet or a Linacre. The picture is of that quiet, sober, thoughtful quality which marks so many of Holbein’s portraits, and none more than those which he painted at this period. The face is not one of particular interest, nor is it of marked intellectual force. It is the face, however, which seems to speak of a man who might very easily become so absorbed in his own studies, without making any great discoveries ' The drawing of Sir Harry Guildford is one of those which are on gray unprepared paper with no preliminary wash of body colour. I3I through them, as to be unable to give time to such sublunary interests as learning the language of the people amongst whom he had to live. The astronomical instruments which lie beside him are wrought with that extraordinary fidelity and delight which a little later is seen at its highest level of accomplishment in the picture of “The Ambassadors.” On this occasion one is inclined to think that Holbein must have had some ado to prevent the instruments becoming more interesting than the astronomer.^ The portraits of Thomas Godsalve and his son, of Norwich, are in one frame in the gallery at Dresden, and, painted on a smaller scale than the “ Warham ” or the “ More,” are of very fine surface and quality, though the personalities which they represent are not very attractive. The study for the portrait of the son is interesting as being, among all the studies at Windsor, that which has been carried furthest in the matter of colour. The background has been washed in blue body colour and the robe in violet, the face being also carried out in the same medium. We are without knowledge of the exact cause which brought Holbein’s first English visit to a sudden conclusion. It may be that the supply of sitters seemed to have come to an end, or it may be that home sickness had begun to set in upon a young man who had left wife and child behind among the people of his own tongue. At any rate in 1528 Holbein was back in the city by the side of the Rhine. The old biographers give the date of his return as 1529, but the discovery of a document which shows that in 1528 Holbein bought a house in Basel overlooking the river, establishes not only the date of his return but also the fact that the painter must have been fairly successful in his money matters in England—far more successful than he was destined to be again in Basel, where things had gone from bad to worse. ^ It is interesting to know that Nicholas Kratzer was at the age of thirty admitted to Fox’s New College of Corpus Christi at Oxford. He was appointed by Cardinal Wolsey to lecture on mathematics, and in 1520 Tunstall described him as “Maker of the King’s horologies.” While at Corpus he designed two sundials, one for St. Mary’s Church which existed till 1744. and another for Corpus Garden. His MS. “ De Horologiis ” is in Corpus Library. 132 ••1 CHAPTER XIV SECOND VISIT TO BASEL—1528-1531 W HEN Holbein saw Basel again after his English visit, John Froben was dead, though Erasmus was still living at the house in Bauni- leingasse. But there can be little doubt that the death of the good printer deprived Holbein of his hope of finding much work to do for the wood- engravers. The mind of Erasmus was by its natural bent far more directed to the literary than to the artistic side of the publisher’s task, and he probably lacked the technical instinct which Froben—himself apparently a practical engraver—possessed in a high degree. Hans Liitzelburger, too, was dead, and had left no equal behind him. Holbein’s output, therefore, of designs for the forinschneider was far smaller in his second visit to Basel than it had been in his first. Things were very much at a standstill in Basel at the moment, and in no department was the paralysis which had fallen upon all industries felt more than in Art. The hostility which had at first displayed itself merely against such pictures as had been used for superstitious purposes, or for impostures, had spread thence by slow degrees to all religious pictures, until by a decree of the council of Basel a condemn¬ ation of their use in churches had been definitely passed. The decree had doubtless strengthened the hands of those who a little later were strong enough to carry through, with little resistance, the iconoclastic raid upon all religious art in the churches of Basel. When Holbein arrived in 1528 in the city the prospect for an artist was sorely discouraging. A glance at the list of his known works during his stay of nearly three years will show that there is no corresponding time of his art career which seems to have produced so little. Probably the very first picture which he attacked after his arrival was the portrait of his wife Elsbeth and his two children, Philip and Katherina, which hangs now in the museum of Basel. An examination of the picture suggests at once the circumstances under which it was painted. It is on several sheets of paper, whose joins are quite visible, and which seem to have been subsequently fixed down upon a wood panel. Probably Holbein began it without any intention of making it into a finished picture, using just such material as lay ready to his hand, and as the work grew and seemed to “come,” as a modern artist would say, he carried it forward to such a pitch that it became worth his while to bestow great pains on its finish 133 and to transfer it to a panel. This portrait is not the only instance of a similar action in Holbein’s case. The “Erasmus” at Basel is also painted on a sheet of paper fixed upon a panel, and there are several similar instances. One may assure oneself that this portrait of his wife and children was taken up on the spur of the moment, perhaps a day or two after his return, and before he had gathered about him any stock of studio properties. It is quite certain that he would not have commenced what presently became a very important work on so perishable and unpromising a material as a few sheets of paper joined together. But the very circumstances of speed and spontaneity under which the picture was evidently painted in its first stages have given a force and a freedom and a largeness which is not surpassed by anything which Holbein ever produced. It is as spontaneous and broad in its hand¬ ling as the freest sketch of the great portrait painters of a later age. Spontaneity—I regret the use of this most ugly phrase—is not the quality of course which impresses itself first upon us in most of Holbein’s finished portraits in oil. But here we have the genius of Holbein concentrating itself for a few hours on what is the nearest approach to a brilliant, and summary, and completely seen sketch that exists among all his works in oil. He is free from all restraint, and working with the inspiration at white heat. The touch is transparent, juicy, and rich. The modelling, executed with broad and rapid, yet very subtle transitions of tone, is of masterly simplicity and directness. The realization of every detail which gives character to a portrait is as full as in his most exactly wrought portraits. There is nothing more satisfactory and more masterly—though there are many things more beautiful through the charms of the sitter—than this broadly rendered and uncompromising portrait of the painter’s wife and children. Frau Elsbeth was certainly not attractive. Her features are not merely homely, they are also heavy and uninteresting, and she is built in a solid and somewhat unwieldly mould. But Holbein has given to her that tender and affectionate movement of a mother towards the children at her knee which makes the plainest of mothers for the time being a Madonna. Frau Holbein was, it must be confessed, uncompromisingly plain. It has been suggested by some writers that in his “ Solothurn Madonna” Holbein had used in creating his ideal some vision of the features of his wife. It is a large assumption that those seven years had changed the vision of Solo¬ thurn into the reality of the Basel portrait. But at this stage we find one of those theories brought in which meet us so continually in the lives of the early painters. Karel Van Mander in his “ Schilderboek,” or lives of the painters, published in 1604, had, in the absence of accurate details of Holbein’s life, built up, as was common with Van Mander and biographers of his type, a story of family discord in the Holbein home. Holbein is supposed by that author, and by one or two who followed him, to have lived 134 ELSBETH HOLBEIN BASEL ^ ^'^i. Biit hcrc'W#:!^^ :t-»if H i a ^;^A- hc^uns on v-baS ■muva^sry, sod fwmptrid> -Tcn Mfl; ill £r^ {|C«r< vJ ; :?<: aiiri, ,»r.5 - -^' '■ /’ta Uk^ it \’ ,:v:-^ --^t, ^ . ■ i^f h > V- . ■ -—’- - i . .. ai >: ^s-.s^ AjUSn - :’. f'sftfcte* Q(m 0 ^ 'A' ;;'. »jt be conlnM -Wti.' . V . thr 9 l^ 4 l^ .4 - )w-:. 1— ■ fev =rtfc '' • * * .-. - m ^ ' j» r' of be "fcV ' - -f SUr®U6<«il im--'y*a>»'^»>feitt itei is^ -s , -^y'^-^i^ig^j^- ■ . n^ ■■ :■ ■.*» Y-i ! riiat AWSs ksd * feasi H«n WO ! . £^.% »a»^3jw ^ IfeB^vc* 3 «■ ‘:i :. jim j fcaa i^fcjl^tBwn >^tik-h he -V.«- tt^'=^ ='Wl ibt tiaie- ^ . ^iiWfew £fi ##i^aiqr^^'>a «i£ * ^awatt >-J ;s»e^ *«S«: |^ «;(^k>:xr4 »^n 4 *irt»,7tr4t j>« fWi-se^^ 44 . li™ W *^,*-- ^s-li^ ^fcers «tf ;’W^ fc V,::>,,V'=•«.■« •’ iil|ut jewd Ntyr iiife>^.ij^ 'r >:■• *icgiJtet »J% *rsS4i v-ate 1^ OS4t Ijh&ri* ftuif^t^ pysa «ii^ » a, «i ' ' |: < ^ j^j. i j ;y M^;.^->.-y, - ' -l'-’^ j ; Im ^ .^'■)^i]>Siii^'!f; -»-jarf»4 ^vim t«. 1^4^ fc»gt,*^Sjpf SGI^^, !a(1fe^;te»ja(SV !n?«£!!KS. •«-* --t saw 4»iijrt,- Hf tifk give us ne k(» af bn^ "aeiowafcH^ i^*4'Vf%^ iSlMi* taia4ii^ |b i%e «Blt for wl^idi]jl| ei^ fA ■m^tAi'f- <^f««v ft &«• j^iai^civ ?sftd dramatic rtutf-Wif Sfi^eSa 4Ma 4iU iiis Jltiry. Il»e Jdng site cntwaiap ut . MK^py wbuK; oirtaia it is n«Miaca*)l» Jkf Uf ^ • AHir>4e-1ys man|ftiaiMar eoptatcd. He stoops fonrard diiMjiiii^|bi^ UA icivcordsjt^ gaiSj WjB£N»ia(enurs. wW stead U:Ss^g i* tdi & |j Hiand as ittetidaat fcafes ai.Ecourgc. J^ibc ba^- the ateife'i> ‘ Ul^ ^. v-teit'^ ipwi^ we e«»veitee|. tov tSie iji _ , ^deufoerS* iw 4te ' .‘»-t'l^ ' jy.te4 ^W.cgafte, ^d tfci*- »i>* otWer ni4««B^d tob^al^Sr^ e^Mk tgt isot ab:iefit w* jta* att foiftB lfee'^‘j4;^ • l^fiK tetekn^y al l i i iSh rte te Arfa ttfOy |i« Sife..§i5-%te^ yrrin>tteiaitt^ct-itetf4»«amj^ ytefifty ■ rt , > »* ; »>. dyanfdsg rii#Bfity ritet wJntft iSe lari - i^iWu 4* It fo i* ®#5>j»-i«d tlte! ift «w &iei»Wd vtxk <««» v > aaie ^i»,»atrv«t «l m ttuj^ yea» «fas aids *36 T®i A 40 awo :jaaa.a to aMUTsoo to tomst tkt imis^ - i ‘■ M ■■ The other subject, the meeting of Saul with Samuel after his conquest of the Amalekites, is even a finer composition. Samuel, a grandly-designed figure on the left of the composition, advances with his left arm pointing fiercely towards the herd of oxen which is being driven down from the height on which is seen the blazing city. “What meaneth then this lowing of the oxen which I hear?” and Saul is seen advancing in front of his host, with his right hand held out to greet the prophet with the unctuous words, “ Blessed art thou of the Lord, I have fulfilled all the commandment of the Lord.” The difference between the stern, strong attitude of Samuel and the slightly wheedling approach of Saul is wonderfully expressive. But the portion of the design which most impresses one, and which most fills one with regret that we cannot see it as it finally appeared, is the mass of advancing horsemen who follow a little in the rear of Saul. It is a finely-conceived mass of moving men, who convey, indeed, all the idea of an advancing body of troops, without confusion of the design. Holbein has used the spears of his warriors with much the same masterly sense of composition as Velazquez in the “Surrender of Breda” or Piero della Francesca in his fresco at Arezzo. They not only break up what would otherwise be an empty space of sky, but they impart a strong sense of movement and also of numbers to the host below. The individual figures of the men are strongly and vividly designed, and they succeed in impressing one, as so few figures thus arrayed in classical costume ever succeed in doing, as living and moving soldiers and not as theatre supernumeraries. The flames of the burning city, rolling into the sky, do for the left-hand side of the composition what the spears of the horsemen do for the right. It has been suggested by Dr. Woltmann that these two subjects painted on the walls of the Rathaus of Basel in 1829-30 have reference to the condition of Basel with regard to the rest of Germany at that time, when the moment of her separation from it was approaching. But it must be remembered that these subjects had been decided on for the Rathaus so early as 1522, when no such strained relations existed. I am only able to see in them two examples, set visibly before the eyes of all men in the public hall of the city, of the evil effects of bad government, and of the selfwill of rulers untempered by the laws of God. Such a reference is quite in keeping with the spirit in which such subjects were commonly placed before the citizens of the law-abiding cities of Germany. Paid thus with his seventy-two gulden, Holbein was left to look for further work in Basel. That he did not find it in great abundance is proved by the fact that he was ready to accept fourteen gulden as a commission for repainting the two faces of the clock on the Rheingate, which had in it one of those uncouth mechanical figures in which the German taste of that day delighted. One wonders whether Holbein upon his scaffold, painting the 137 T front of his clock, turned his thoughts back again sometimes to the house at Chelsea and the palace at Lambeth, We find therefore that the recorded earnings—of course there must have been more—of Hans Holbein during the three years of his second stay in Basel amounted to under one hundred florins; and we need feel no manner of surprise—neither need we call into the explanation the imagined angularities of Frau Elsbeth—that the painter, who had probably exhausted the greater part of his English savings, resolved once more to try his fortunes in the northern island. Before he left Basel, or on his way back to England, he paid, it would seem, a visit to Erasmus at Freiburg im Bresgau. The small circular medallion portrait at Basel of Erasmus appears to have been executed during this second visit. The portrait seems to show Erasmus older than will agree with any period previous to Holbein’s first departure for England, and, since Erasmus died in 1536, it cannot belong to the later passing visit to Basel which Holbein made in 1538. It is an admirable and expressive little work, which suffers more than most from reproduction. 138 CHAPTER XV THE RETURN TO ENGLAND—THE STEELYARD PERIOD H olbein probably reached London early in the year 1532, and he had not been long there before it repented the authorities of Basel that they had let go from their city one whose work had been so good and withal so cheap. And therefore in the September of that year they sent to him a letter urging him to return to look after his wife and children, and with the further inducement of a promise of an income of thirty pieces a year. But Holbein turned a deaf ear. Much had happened in England during the years of his absence. Late in 1529 the great cardinal had fallen, and More had succeeded to his post as Lord Chancellor. And now in this same year of 1532, within a month or two of Holbein’s return to England, More himself was to resign his office (May 16), and to retire to his home at Chelsea quietly to wait till the inevitable storm broke. For events were advancing rapidly, and the causes which were to change and make not merely the history of England, but with it also the history of Europe itself, were already shaping them¬ selves. The divorce of Katharine, long a burning question, was now the thought uppermost in all minds, and was destined to be fraught with consequences that hardly the most far-seeing could have forecast. Henry was on the point of cutting that Gordian knot for himself by his marriage with Anne Boleyn, and, in so cutting it, to sever himself and the country from the power of the Pope. Politics, religion, social life were all in a state of upheaval. And the men and women who were to play the chief and often the most tragic parts in each and all of the most stirring events of our national life were destined to be amongst Holbein’s sitters. To be called upon to be the recorder of such men and women at such a time must have had, to a man of Holbein’s mind, a fascination about it which made it little likely that he should listen to the voices of the good burghers of Basel, charm they never so wisely. It must have hit strangely well with that grim humour of Holbein’s, and that dramatic insight of his which produced the “ Imagines Mortis” and the “Alphabet of Death,” to find himself amongst the men and the women, noble and ignoble, brave and cowardly, generous and mean, who were all playing their parts now in a dance of death in 1532 far more real than any which he had imagined. The stage was ready and the dance was 139 set. As he saw Death laying his clutches upon queen and upon chancellor, upon baron and bishop, abbot and monk, knight and lawyer, and merchant and pauper, how often he must have thought of those imaginings of his which Ltitzelburger had cut for him years before, but which lay as yet hidden away in some cupboard at Basel or at Lyons. Wherever he may have had his lodging during his first sojourn in England, it is quite certain that in the early part of this second visit he was housed somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Steelyard, the Hanseatic settlement of the German merchants, which occupied a portion of the river bank above London Bridge at the point where Cannon Street Railway Station now stands. The statement sometimes made that he had apart¬ ments in the Steelyard is manifestly incorrect, since it was one of the strictest of the many strict rules which governed that commercial monastery that no one should be entertained within it who was not of the Hanseatic community. That he lived in the neighbourhood for the sake of fellowship with his compatriots is all that we can assert. An old tradition existed that he was lodged in one of the houses which stood on old London Bridge, and certainly it is a position which an artist might well have chosen for himself. But in the absence of more definite information, which is hardly likely to be now discovered, we must be content to know that until his appointment as King’s Limner and his removal to Whitehall, probably in 1536) he was established near London Bridge and near the Steelyard, which provided him with most of his sitters. The German Steelyard, otherwise called the Guildhall of the Germans of the Hanseatic League, obtained its name probably from the great steel¬ yard or weighing machine which stood at its entrance and recorded the weights of all its exports and its imports. The German colony of traders dated back, in its first beginnings, to a period long before the development of the Hanseatic League. It owed its chief privileges to those two warlike and impecunious sovereigns, Richard 1 . and Edward HI. The latter, indeed, had always had a leaning towards his German supporters since he had obtained from the merchants of Cologne so substantial an advance upon his crown, which lay there in pawn. He conveyed to the Steelyard community, in return for moneys which came into the privy purse, monopolies which proved for nearly two centuries a paralysis to the enterprise of the English merchants. Klipfish from Norway, tallow and oak from the Baltic, woven stuffs from the Netherlands and from Augsburg, wines from the Rhineland, and a score of other commodities, were the monopolies of the Hanseatic body, which came to be detested more and more, and with sound reason, as the spirit of English adventure grew with the growth of its people. Historians have, perhaps, never yet taken enough into account the great, though wholly unintended, 140 effect which these monopolies granted to Germany over the English trade with Europe had in helping to drive English adventure into the distant fields of newly-discovered lands, and thereby laying the foundation of the great colonial empire which grew out of that spirit of merchant venture in the far seas. For that as yet invisible result the English of the Tudor days could not be expected to feel grateful. Already in Henry’s reign the Hanseatic monopoly, always deeply unpopular, was beginning to totter. It lasted till Elizabeth’s reign, and passed away under her hand to the destined resting-place of all monopolies. Meanwhile the German Steelyard protected—as indeed did all the Hanseatic colonies wherever stationed— their existence and their privileges with regulations which partook at once of the discipline of a trade guild, a monastery, and a modern public school. Besides possessing these regulations in their completeness, we are also able—though no stone of the English Steelyard remains in sitn —to see in the German wharf, the “ Tuske-Brygge,” as it is still called, at Bergen in Norway the actual houses which were employed for a colony of this description. The plan, which might have been almost suggested by a Carthusian monastery, consisted of a number of small separate houses, each containing bedroom and sitting-room for a merchant, with back apart¬ ments and storage for the workmen and clerks. The buildings were pro¬ tected both on the river front and towards Thames Street by a fortified wall and gateways, whose gates were closed at nine o’clock each night, like those of a college. No married men were allowed to lodge within the precincts—indeed, women were excluded as rigidly as from a monastery nor were any guests allowed who were not of the Hanseatic community. The object of all this exclusiveness, it is needless to explain, was to preserve the solidarity of this body of trade monopolists, and to present an unbroken front against all the inroads which social relations with foreigners might be expected presently to introduce. Once, when a master of the order, who had deserved very well of the body, desired a dispensation to bring his wife within the boundaries, he was incontinently refused. Celibacy was the law of the Steelyard till merchants and celibates were swept away for ever by the virgin queen. The dislike which was felt for this exclusive, and it must be owned tyrannous, body of monopolists was hardly out¬ weighed by the popularity of the celebrated wine-house just outside their walls, where men of all sorts and conditions resorted, especially on a Sunday afternoon, to drink Rhenish out of German beakers. The poor Germans, conscious of their own unpopularity, sought further to propitiate public opinion by means which should reach the heart through a different channel. They were much in evidence at coronations and court pageants with profuse and visible displays of loyalty, for one at least of which the art of Holbein was called in aid. They lay indeed at this time under no 141 small suspicion. Hailing from the fatherland of Luther, it was natural that not a few should have imbibed his doctrines and should be finding forbidden consolation in his writings in a land where they were solitary and strangers. Outwardly, indeed, they thought it well to preserve the character of the colony for orthodoxy by expending the fines imposed for breaches of regulations in candles of prodigious size kept burning in All Hallows church. But when in the year 1527 it was noised that a cargo of 20,000 copies of Tyndal’s New Testament had been landed at the Steel¬ yard, SirThomas More, who had already taken fright at Lutheranism, came down to make inquisition. The bulk of the copies had already got them¬ selves dispersed, and the merchants vainly protested that there was not such a thing as a heretic in the place. Copies enough were discovered to make a little procession of five “ men of the Stillyard,” who, clad in strange penitential garments, followed behind Barnes the heretic in his parade thrice round the bonfire at the Great Northern Rood—that is, the great crucifix at the north end of Paul’s Churchyard—and solemnly cast in their editions of the forbidden book into the flames. Then they went back to their commerce at the German wharf, which thenceforth they took care to carry forward without the corrupting presence of the New Testament, for no further heretics are recorded from that time forward, and by the time that Holbein was amongst them they had so far propitiated Sir Thomas More that the chancellor, it is said, wrote for them the Latin couplets which accompanied the “Triumph of Riches ” that Holbein painted for them; which shows indeed that the Germans had come to know the value of orthodoxy as a commercial asset, and also that they were judges enough of human nature to understand the vulnerable side of a scholar. It was amongst these men, and those who were in touch with them, that Holbein was for the next few years to find his sitters. They were, doubtless, prosaic subjects, men without a history, men into whose lives little of the heroic could be expected to enter. Their only opportunity of playing any part in the stirring drama of that day in England was confined to an occasional parade round a bonfire, with just the further possibility that if they were caught erring again they might themselves constitute the bonfire. There is no danger, therefore, of our being led away by the glamour of their historic interest into overrating the artistic value of their portraits. If Holbein had been able at any time to do less than his best here would have been at once his most wholesome discipline. Of art these excellent German merchants were perhaps no great connoisseurs, but they were shrewd judges of their money’s worth, and had probably their own ideas as to whether a portrait was a true likeness or not. And they demanded, one may be sure, not merely exact likenesses of themselves, but faithful renderings of such objects as made part and parcel of their daily occupation 142 in the merchant’s office. The series of Steelyard portraits which Holbein put forth, so far as we may judge them by those which remain to us— probably less than a moiety of those which he painted—do not fall short in any artistic quality of his great historical portraits. We may take, as a typical example, one which was painted in the first year of his renewed English sojourn, and which may have even been the first which he executed for his friends of the German colony. This is the portrait of the merchant George Gyze, which now hangs in the Berlin Gallery. It shows us a fair- complexioned light-haired German of thirty-four years (we learn this from the inscription), who was evidently dainty in his dress and a man of many affairs. He wears a dark cap and overcoat, from under which proceed a pair of rose silk sleeves. The linen at the throat is of the very finest. He is opening a letter, as we learn from the address, to himself from his brother, and his face, which is neither very intellectual nor very interesting, but just a plain business face, wears that peculiar set expression with which so many people do open their letters, important or unimportant. The little office or counting-house in which he sits is full of the small requirements of office life, inkstand and writing materials, pens and emery box, string- holder, keys, scissors, letters, scales and boxes and cases of several sorts. At his right elbow is a glass vase holding two or three cut carnations, from which a recent German has argued that this was a newly-made bridegroom, since the carnation is the token of love. But the stern laws of the Han.seatic Guilds forbad any such connubial felicity, and compel us to see in George Gyze merely a happy young bachelor who was fond of a flower. The accessories of the picture, which are here in great variety, almost too great a variety, are painted with a fidelity and a realism which even in Holbein’s work has scarcely an equal unless we find it in the “Ambassadors,” or in the “ Sieur de Morette.” For example, a worn quill pen lies on the table, and Holbein has succeeded in giving us every variety of texture that one sees in the natural object, from the smooth glistening surface of the portion against the feather, and the pithy surface of the same where a strip of feather has been torn away, to the actual quill with its blurred purplish look where the ink has spread up the inside. A similar piece of painting will be found in the “Derick Tybis,” another Steelyard portrait, at Vienna. Realism cannot be carried further, though the means of arriving at it may be, as in the case of a Hals or a Velazquez, entirely different. And in selecting this particular quill pen to draw the reader’s attention to in the picture, I do so merely to point to the peculiarly close observation of nature and the intense delight in rendering all natural objects exactly as he had observed them which from earliest to latest marks Holbein. He possessed this minute observation, and the corresponding love of precise rendering, to such a degree that if it had not been accompanied in him by other qualities 143 the very highest which an artist can possess, he might have been nothing higher than the most imitative of property painters. Yet even so the most consummate of the Dutchmen who ever painted texture and surface would have had to do him reverence. No doubt in bestowing this extraordinary care and skill on these natural objects in the portrait of Gyze, and, generally speaking, in all the Steelyard portraits which followed it, Holbein had a special reason beyond the mere delight in the artistic accomplishment. This picture of Gyze was, in all probability, a test picture, a diploma work by which his credit was to stand or fall amongst the community in which his lot was cast. It was work which would captivate his critics, though not if it were inserted at the expense of a true likeness of the man. He goes, therefore, to what he must himself have felt to be the very extreme point of imitative realism. If he had gone beyond, and had made his portrait of that ball of string which hangs above Gyze’s head more the object to look at than Gyze’s own head, he might, or he might not, have been forgiven by the Steelyard critics, but he would certainly not have been forgiven by those who were to judge him thereafter, he would certainly have not been forgiven by himself. And he prevents you from feeling your first and foremost interest in the books and the seals and the ball of string, not by painting them less interestingly—you might cut each one out separately and keep it by itself, it would be an interesting and beautiful six inches of paint—but by making the merchant still the most interesting thing there. All the other accessory objects, being proper to a merchant and his work, become absolutely a part of him, and do not offend you by crying out one by one that they possess a separate existence, and that you must look at them first whether you like it or no. Holbein has in this picture been very bold in his colour. He has placed Gyze in a background of willow green, formed by the paint of the woodwork of the panels and shelves. This colour is deliciously broken and varied by the signs of wear and tear, the rubbing off of paint from the edges of the shelves, and a score of small contrivances which, though they appear to be mere accidents of the true nature of the painted wood, are placed there with masterly calculation. Black and rose against willow green does not sound a combination which every artist could handle successfully. Nor, indeed, is it. But the portrait of George Gyze is a beautiful and extremely refined piece of harmonized tints. It is to be remarked that neither in the case of George Gyze, nor in any of the Steelyard series, have the original sketches survived. Of these said portraits I may enumerate the following, excusing myself from exact description in each case, where it could serve no purpose except to weary the reader. Perhaps the next in order of merit after the “Gyze” should be 144 placed the “Derich Tybis” of Vienna (1533), the portrait of a man un¬ known (1533), now at Berlin, but formerly the property of Sir John Millais, “A Merchant” (1532), in the Schonbrunn Gallery, Vienna (said, however, to be a member of the Cornish family of Trelawney), and a portrait at Windsor (1532), which from the interpretation of the address on the letter (open, however, to much doubt) is asserted to be a portrait of Hans of Antwerp, the king’s jeweller, for whom Holbein made many designs, and whom he left as his executor. Another portrait of the same date is the “ Ambros Fallon” at Brunswick. The portrait of Robert Cheseman at the Hague, now known to be a gentleman of Dormanswell near Norwood, who was long described in error as “The Falconer of Henry VIII.,” bears date of 1533, and is merely the portrait of one who took his pleasure in hawking. He holds a peregrine hooded upon his gloved wrist, a magni¬ ficent piece of painting, in which it is hard to say whether man or hawk is the most sympathetically understood. The beautiful portrait of Derich Born or de Born at Windsor Castle (1533) is often described as that of one of the Steelyard merchants. Mr. W. F. Dickes has suggested that the portrait is that of the son of Theodoric de Born, printer of Deventer in Holland. The general type of the sitter certainly agrees well enough with that ascription, seeming as it does to belong to one whose pursuits were intellectual. This portrait was formerly hung so high and in so bad a light that it was impossible to recognize its true merits. But recently it has been taken down and hung in a good position, and displays itself in its true beauty as one of those restrained and thoughtful portraits which Holbein loved to paint. There are, it may be observed, none of the signs of the counting house which Holbein often gave in his portraits of the Steelyard merchants. On the other hand, it is most probable that it was through his Steelyard connection that Holbein counted de Born amongst his sitters, and it may be safely reckoned as one of that cycle. Few finer or more enjoyable works have come from his hand. It was from his connection with the Steelyard, however, that an occasion arose of displaying himself in public in a manner which, though it probably brought him little fame with the crowd, who gaze but who do not inquire, was yet calculated to draw attention to him from those whose notice was worth his having. In the summer of 1533, when Anne Boleyn, secretly married to Henry in the January of that year, was to make her triumphal entry into London for her coronation, the German colony, mindful of past bonfires, and still more mindful of that disestablishment which they knew to be hanging over them, resolved to outdo all classes by a visible display of loyalty on a grand scale. They erected at the corner of Gracechurch Street, an important point of the route through the City, a triumphal arch 145 under which the procession, with Anne on her horse-litter, “sitting in her hair,” as Cranmer expressed it, must necessarily pass on her way from the Tower to Westminster. The carrying out of this project was given to their countryman Holbein, for the whole offering was to be by and through Germans, He accordingly prepared a scheme for a great central arch with two smaller arches at the side in the manner of a Roman arch of triumph. On the summit was a representation, either in sculpture or more probably by living persons—a tableau vivant, in fact—of Apollo surrounded by the nine Muses, an allegorical expression of the supremacy of Henry in the cultivated arts and sciences. The pen-and-ink sketch for this scheme is in the Print Room at Berlin, and is evidently a rapid and spontaneous setting down of a first idea. It is far freer and bolder, and with less elaboration of parts and details than we are used to in the drawings of Holbein. For example, the panellings of the arch are indicated hastily and with no attempt at careful exactness. He has given merely enough to show to him¬ self and to others how the effect would be likely to come. And the drawing must be reckoned, and all artists will certainly reckon it, as amongst the most delightful and suggestive which Holbein has left to us. The design of the group above gives a pyramidal shape, culminating in the figure of Apollo, a young man in Court costume, seated, holding in his left hand a harp, while with his right hand outspread he guides the harmonies of the choir beneath. The fountain of Parnassus, Hippocrene, a very well-ordered poetic source, contained in a shapely Renaissance basin, spouts beneath the feet of the god. It streamed all night with Rhenish after the coronation. Two of the chief muses. Calliope and Polyhymnia, very graceful figures, especially that on the right, are seated with viol and lute on either side the fountain. It may well have been a very lovely feature of that gorgeous pageant when it was translated into the life. It may or it may not have caught the eye of Henry himself as he rode beneath, and have served to remind him of his loyal Germans—he had a shrewd notion of the value of flattery as of a good many other things, however—but it certainly did not for the present bring the name of Holbein into the list of Court painters. By the time that Holbein was to enter upon office as a king’s limner in 1536, that joyful pageant was long forgotten, and poor Anne was to take part in a very different procession, which also started from the Tower.* So for the present Holbein has to be content still with such commis¬ sions as his grave commercial countrymen of the Steelyard can afford him. ' We are told that Anne rode on a horse-litter beneath a golden canopy hung with silver bells, her horses draped in white and gold. She herself sat with her hair down—it was her chief claim to beauty, and, like her eyes, was dark brown, and on this occasion it flowed from beneath a diadem of gold and precious stones, and was itself starred with jewels. 146 i * - ... ^ A*, lu.-:*- is*?^’' ,;.' - fnfv'a! Mv-'^'SW iwts ^ ’ - w'*U->-t *1-^* Sl*t h C- , : :. - • .1 !■■. imiTicrclaJ cou3itrj'rR' j. .1% • ' • tr»i! ii' '-"'■‘.‘.;y<^ j. - i << /^.•v.', '.V-^ • • ■ t . , ' *. , ;'is. .. I-'*...* ■ V ■ . ‘ ■♦ • I f ’’*,/• I -■ Ni •j^y\ •I'W: f-' ' ■ 9 r‘ ,v::V; -,, . V'-^'; :■' *' ■' w- f • 41 / CjuJ- V I • • H .“a *.' • ;v ivt'■■ • ■ fit'-. « .. •/■ •>f- ^ • . "• .^1 ^y. tU^ -v;-:',:?S&?.„gKM^ - ■ '■■ '. ' . ■' '■■ t .,, ■ t . «i t Saffroy the parchment was found to be still unsold. Its authenticity as a seventeenth-century document was vouched for by the experts of the British Museum. The parchment is now preserved in the National Gallery, to which gallery it was presented by Miss Hervey. It states that the two persons represented are, on the left of the picture, Jean de Dinteville, Bailly de Troyes, who was in London as French ambassador during the great part of the year 1533 ; while the younger man on the right is his friend George de Selve, who a year later was consecrated Bishop of Lavaur, and had paid a visit to Dinteville in London in 1533. Corroboration was found in another original memorandum still preserved in the Biblioth^que de I’lnstitut at Paris. Miss Hervey at once made her discovery known, and in the year 1900 embodied her information on the subject in a well-known monograph.^ The solution appeared to have been reached, and the last word to have been spoken. But Mr. W. F. Dickes once more mustered his forces, and finally in the year 1903 issued his book,^ in which he once more identifies the two persons in the picture as the counts-palatine of the Rhine, Otto Henry and his brother Philipp. He sets aside the evidence of the parchment slip as a seventeenth-century fabrication, probably by the hand which, in his view, added the name “ Polizy ” to the Nuremberg globe which we see in the picture. So far for the demolition of his opponent’s position. His own view he supports by a very careful and intricate analysis of the setting and arrangement of the various astronomical instruments in the picture itself. According to his reading of these, they point to the exact year, month, day, and even the hour of birth of the two individuals, the one (Otto Henry) having been born on the loth of April, 1502, at 10.33 p.m., and the other (Philipp) on November 12th, 1503, at 5 a.m. Both these dates he declares to be accurately set forth to the very hour by the evidence of the instruments. The reader will at once recognize the fact that a controversy which has already exhausted many isolated magazine articles, and has further called forth an entire volume on either side, could not be investigated in this book save at such length as would make the sacrifice of more important matter inevitable. I must frankly admit myself incapable of testing the astronomical accuracy of Mr. Dickes’ deductions. I must be content to have stated the general conclusion of either side of the controversy, and for the details of their respective arguments must refer my readers to the books already mentioned. On the one side we have the documentary evidence produced by Miss Hervey; upon the other side we have Mr. W. F. Dickes’ interpretation of the instruments, which, if his reading be right, points to the birth-dates of his two counts. It is a question of the value ‘ “Holbein’s Ambassadors,” Mary F. S. Hervey. G. Bell and Sons. 1900. * “ Holbein’s Ambassadors unriddled.” Cassell and Co. 1903. 153 X of the evidence on one side or the other. I may not for my own part avoid the responsibility of expressing an opinion, and in saying that I adopt Miss Hervey’s view that the two persons are Frenchmen and not Germans, and that they do represent Jean de Dinteville and George de Selve, I by no means ignore the importance of Mr. Dickes’ contribution to the question. But whichever identification we prefer, we are able to say with cer¬ tainty, for the circumstances in this point fit either pair equally well, that Holbein found himself face to face with an occasion which was full of inspiration for him, and called out from him his highest and most willingly given effort. These were men of intellectual attainment and of cultivated interests. The wonderful array of scientific instruments which the picture contains, whatever may have been its use in pointing to a birthday, cer¬ tainly gave to Holbein the justifiable opportunity for indulging his own taste in the exact rendering of these objects. As we saw to be the case, therefore, in the office equipments of “George Gyze,” so here these accompaniments became part and parcel of the lives and occupations of the men themselves, an essential part, in fact, of the portraits themselves, and the reality with which they are painted becomes an element in the reality of the men. It is possible to find amongst Holbein’s portraits, as, for example, in the “ George Gyze ” and in the “ Sieur de Morette,” presently to be mentioned, surface of a more exquisite quality and more fascinating presentments of character. The panel is of very large size, and hardly admits of the jewel¬ like treatment which we find in the technique of some of his smaller panels. The men, too, were grave men, of thoughtful character and tastes, as one might divine from one glance at their faces, even if other evidence were absent, and did not lend themselves to bright and sparkling treatment. Nowhere, indeed, throughout the whole range of his portraits, do we ever find Holbein sacrificing the least element of character to any desire to exhibit a triumph of technical dexterity, or to fascinate where it is his mere duty to record. He paints you a picture of grave and learned men—and there is over it all an air of gravity—part of the essential truth of the picture, conveyed to you by the whole feeling of the work. Holbein’s greatness shows itself at its greatest often in the self-restraint, the reticence, the complete absence of all self-consciousness, all display of self. There is no brilliant legerdemain, no astonishing passage of rapid technique. He loses himself absolutely in his subject. You do not think of him at all till you have finished thinking of his picture. Even then it all seems so to have come of itself, all to be there as it is because it could not have been there in any other way, that you are in danger of forgetting the power of this man, which shows itself as much in his reserve as many another man’s power is shown in its display. Stand for half an hour before “The 154 . Sj Vf/C,!- DVJsi n,'^; ] S), a5c e^ ic/o rre f/\/u/jrr (^U7c^/ff>. ■■i i]!| 3 .i*' '- '\-V Vt-i ---' :.v'’ S'\;‘-^ .<«• . '..^:;z rS J t'^Mir ' 'V'-’’’ ■ -V i'^ ' -* ' * . -nrJ/l ■: VOP® . 1 . ^ 'V^Ji :■^ r^ci,^ ‘ • c ' x :'^K '. \*' 5 / w 4 >?^v i ■ • ':- ■ -r~,» >v , Ambassadors ” of Holbein and you may find yourself thinking of every¬ thing except the painter. The colour of the picture is grave and solemn, standing somewhat apart from the comparative gaiety of the “ George Gyze ” and from the rich brilliancy of the “Sieur de Morette.” The blacks and the reds of Court wear in that day were, as we have already urged, colours that required to be sub¬ dued into accord rather than hues which offered to the artist a ready-made feast of harmonies. In this case the colour problem was made more difficult than usual by the sad-coloured robe of purple with which one of them is clothed. A rich table-rug, somewhat of the pattern of the rug in the Dresden edition of the “ Meier Madonna,” reads like a doubtful expedient for bringing together the colour scheme of the picture, especially when it is added that the curtain in the background is of a rich green damask. But the whole has been brought together into a harmony of low tone but of much grave richness, while light has been brought into the picture with a force which at first escapes you, because it is so little assertive, in the white fur of the “ambassador’s” cape, the gold of his Order of St. Michael and of his dagger, and also in the details of the instruments which lie on the table between the two figures. Of the rendering of these same instruments it is only necessary to say that they touch the highest possible level of attainment in that direction. Their realism is obtained by no feat of dexterity, but by a self-restrained process aiming at perfection. You cannot, as in the case of some brilliant tour de force by Frans Hals or by Velazquez step aside to ask yourself and to see how it is done. You ask no such questions as you stand before a Holbein. Your mind hardly troubles itself to ask how it is done. It is there: and it is there so naturally that it hardly occurs to you to wonder how it got there. The curious object which lies between the two men is pronounced to be a human skull painted in a distorted fishlike shape, which assumes the true appearance of a skull when seen by a person standing at a particular angle to the picture.^ The insertion of this curious optical illusion reminds one of the tricks of fancy which are recorded in the chapter on the wall paintings of Holbein. But such a feature is here introduced, no doubt, with a good reason, having regard to the tastes of the two men for whom the portrait was painted and to whom this object lesson in scientific optics would be a lasting interest, as well as a perpetual hallmark to remind those 1 Mr. W. F. DIckes sees in this human skull presented with its shadow in this fishlike shape a double, or even multiple allusion, first to the fish, the emblem of Bavaria; again, in special reference to Philipp, “the sign of whose father’s house was a fish”; again, in reference to the theory of Apian, Philipp’s friend, concerning comets, “ that the heads of comets are tangible solids, and their tails as it were the shadows of their heads.” Lastly, he believes the skull to be, beyond its intention as a memento mofi, a direct reference to the story of the Empress Adelaide and Otto the Great {A.D. 952), ancestors of Counts Otto and Philipp. 155 who came after of their pursuits and studies: to this use of it must be added, of course, its very obvious purpose as a memento mori. It will be convenient at this point to consider another portrait by Hol¬ bein, which, though it was probably painted several years later, represents another ambassador of France, who in the year i 534 succeeded de Dinteville in London, on the return of the latter to his own country. This was Charles Sober, “Sieur de Morette,” whose portrait has hung for a long time in the same room as the Dresden edition of the “ Meier Madonna” under the name of Hubert Morett, jeweller to Henry VIII. At an earlier stage of its existence it was for many years described as a portrait of Ludovico Sforza by Leonardo da Vinci. In the year i860 the original drawing was purchased by the Dresden Gallery from a London dealer, and hangs close by the oil painting in the same room. It is only recently that the official catalogue has recognized the portrait as that of the “ Sieur de Morette.” Whatever has been said of the stimulus which Holbein was likely to have felt in painting the “Ambassadors” of the National Gallery may obviously be applied with equal force to this portrait at Dresden. Holbein has given us in the “ Sieur de Morette” of the Dresden Gallery a portrait which combines in their highest manifestation all the qualities which are most characteristic of his art. As an expression of individual character, as a presentment of a real living being as he looked and spoke and thought and was, portraiture can go no further. As a piece of technical achievement one may go to the painters in whom achievement shows, by all consent, at its very highest, and you will turn away again with the assurance that Holbein has nothing to fear by the comparison. As a piece of delicious surface— we have very frequently to refer to that purely technical feature of Holbein’s practice—a piece of texture delightful to the eye apart from all mental and aesthetic messages which painting has to convey, nothing more delicate, more brilliant, and more exquisite came from the master’s hand. The picture is noticeable for a quality which belongs indeed to other of Holbein’s por¬ traits, but to none in so high a degree as to this. You may view it near or far, up to the very limit at which it begins to be no longer recognizable to the sight, and it is equally at any distance a portrait of a man and at no distance an incoherent piece of paint. There are men, Frans Hals is a good example, much of whose work can only be seen properly at a dis¬ tance of some fourteen feet, though it is often superb when so seen. There are others, again, as for example some of the more minute of the early Flemings and of the early Italians, whose work can only be properly seen at a distance of a few feet and becomes a mere mass of indistinguishable but lovely jewellery at thrice the distance. But with this portrait of Morette,^ 1 It is interesting to note that Mr. Dickes claims this portrait as that of Count Otto at a later age, and attributes it to Christopher Amberger. 156 irrf o/ luifri/oTi /rr yi/rA, CHAPTER XVII THOMAS CROMWELL AND OTHER PORTRAITS From 1534 to 1536 T he first two years of Holbein’s sojourn near his countrymen of the Steelyard had brought him, as we have seen, few sitters beyond the worthy but not extremely interesting German merchants. The year 1533, with its triumphal arch, and with its picture of the English gentleman Robert Cheseman, and the French ambassador deDinteville, begins to show an enlargement of his circle, while in the year 1534 we find the name of Thomas Cromwell, who as yet held no higher office about the Court than as Keeper of the King’s Jewel House, but who already was employed by the king, or say rather who employed himself, on an infinite number of important tasks, and who was already shaping the policy of Henry towards those ends which have earned for the next ten years of England the not unsuitable name of The English Terror. It was not, however, through any Court con¬ nection probably that Holbein obtained this commission, but rather by the fact of his constant presence at the Steelyard. For Cromwell had his hand deep in many ventures, public and private, political and commercial. He had himself served, at Middelburg in Holland, an apprenticeship to German commerce, and had still large interests in the wool-trade, of whose export the Hanseatic Company possessed a monopoly. He spoke German easily, and there can be little doubt that he who, as it was said a year or two later, kept hired spies in the households of every great nobleman in England, had, in the furtherance of that great scheme of a political Protestant combination of the German princes of Europe, which failed of success at the last perhaps only because of the failure of Henry to take to Anne of Cleves, found good use for the services as trusty messengers of many an one among the German merchants who from time to time were to be found at the Steelyard. Here Cromwell saw the portraits of Gyze, the vice-alderman of the Guild, of Hans of Antwerp, with whom as Keeper of the Jewels he must have had often dealings, and here he must have met with the young German whom in a later year he was perhaps to help on to his office as Royal Painter. For many years, probably since the day when the transfer of the great series of Holbein drawings took place from the Earl of Pembroke to the Earl of Arundel, a drawing, which seems to have been left behind, has 159 hung in Wilton House, with the name printed at the bottom in Indian ink, “the Lord Cromwell. Holbein.” Why it should have remained behind, being indeed one of the very finest pieces of handiwork that Holbein ever accomplished, is not at first sight apparent. I make the suggestion that the Earl of Arundel, being one of the firmest of English adherents to the Catholic cause, had no desire to possess the portrait, as it was then accepted, of the man whose very name was loathed by the Catholics of Eng¬ land. That may possibly explain its isolation from the rest of the series, but it does not, of course, throw any light upon the original accuracy of the naming of this most masterly drawing. Mr. Lionel Cust,^ than whom there can be no better authority on the authenticity of any English portrait, says that this drawing does not represent Thomas Cromwell, for whose likeness we must look to the much-repainted oil portrait at Tittenhanger, which has been seen in the Winter Exhibitions of Old Masters at Burlington House. Mr. Cust does not give his reasons, which are, however, doubtless ample, for the decision. One can only regret that it could not have been given in the other direction, since we have to abandon reluctantly a most powerful and characteristic drawing for a painting which has now lost much both of its power and its character. Thomas Cromwell, the son of a Putney blacksmith, was beyond all question one of the most capable as well as one of the most masterful and most determined politicians who ever shaped the destinies of a country. No man perhaps ever had a wider knowledge of his fellow-men for better or for worse, too often for worse, than he who had been most things, from the bellows-boy of a forge to the chief minister of a kingdom. He had spent most of his youth in Italy, a soldier and a ruffian to begin with, as he himself declared—they were much the same thing in Italy in those days —afterwards an accountant in a merchant’s house in Venice. Then he appears a trader of varying fortunes, at one time in a position to borrow money of the banker Frescobaldi, though not in a position to repay for many a long year, when, to his credit, he is said to have done it in the hour of Frescobaldi’s need with liberal usury. Then he drifts nearer to home, and is a thriving wool-merchant at Middelburg. And when he slowly rises into influence in a very different sphere at home as Wolsey’s secretary and sharer of all his secret policy, we find him a man of many parts, of great accomplishment, of liberal tastes, and, above all, of a clear-sighted fearless outlook, and of a determination which had years and years before in his Italian days forgotten the very meaning of the word scruple. For he had come under the spell of Machiavelli, and saw in the unshrinking logic of that strangely honest advocate of thoroughness to wavering princes who were spoiling their chances of success by still clinging intermittently ‘ See article in “Dictionary of National Biography”—Holbein. i6o to the laws of God, an ideal which, to a man of Cromwell’s shrewd intellect, had at least the merit of consistency. He was familiar with the doctrines of “II Principe” some years before it was printed, as we know by his advice to Cardinal Pole, and he had probably possessed it in manuscript since his young days as “a ruffian” in Italy—which was still the Italy of Caesar Borgia, Machiavelli’s hero. Questionless is it that, as he found his power apparently grow, after Wolsey’s fall, year by year with Henry, and as he saw the nobles whom he hated as much as they hated him, go down one after another under his silent catlike policy, the methods taught in “II Principe” were applied by him to the destinies of England with as ruthless but as clear a purpose as ever they had been by the Borgias in their path to power. But Cromwell taught Henry—who was always willing to be marshalled the way he wished to go, but in no other direction—the method of sweeping clear his path by a process wiser than that which the Borgias had used at Sinigaglia, since he taught him how to make his parliament seem to be doing the work. And so things went forward, while the nobles called Cromwell low-born knave, and themselves went to the scaffold. Henry might actually curse him to his face and even strike him “twice or thrice of the week.” But Cromwell kept his policy before him. It was he, beyond question, who had suggested to Henry at the first the method of cutting the Gordian knot, when the Pope refused the divorce, by making himself supreme head of the Church, so that, pope or no pope, it should be treason in any English subject to deny the divorce. It was he who wrote gaily in his diary, “ Item, when it shall please the king that Master More go to his execution?” and “Item, the Abbot of Glastonbury to be tried and executed at Reading.” It was he who devised the abolition of the greater monasteries and made the nobles parties to the act by handing over part of the spoil to them—much of it, he knew, would come back again by the process of confiscation after executions for treason presently. It was at his knees that the wretched Anne Boleyn fell imploring mercy—he stood by her scaffold a short week after. Fate moved her successor in a little over a year, and the road seemed open now for that great stroke of policy by which he was to unite the throne of Henry with the Protestant princes of Germany and complete the fabric which he was building. The keystone of that building was to be Anne of Cleves. But though Cromwell was steeped in the doctrines of Machiavelli, he had forgotten, or had not taken to heart the lesson of that one chapter wherein the writer, whose sentences are fairly aglow with admiration for the masterly policy of Alexander and of Caesar Borgia, yet utters the warning that even such “ virtu ” as these men possessed may be all rendered futile if Fortune turn her back upon them. He would have done well, too, to have remembered the fate of Remiro i6i Y d’Orco, Caesar’s lieutenant, whom Caesar had used as his implement in the Marches of Romagna to carry out his ferocious purposes, and whose body, when he had no further use for the man, he caused to be exhibited one morning in the market-place of Cesena with a bloody knife on the block beside him. Fortune turned her back on Cromwell at that very moment when Anne of Cleves first turned her face upon Henry in the celebrated interview at Greenwich. He had played the perilous game of trying to shape Henry to a policy. There was no man who brooked such handling less than Henry when once he had perceived it, and there were few men who were shrewder to perceive it than he, however little he might seem to be observing. Cromwell had calculated well in many things, marvellously well in some, but there was one thing which neither he nor any other of his day, unless perhaps it was More, who had counted the cost of honesty and was ready to pay it, had rightly estimated, and that was the character of the master whom he believed all the while to be his pupil. It served Henry’s purpose well to have Cromwell for his lieutenant, a Remiro d’Orco on whose shoulders he might rest the odium of his policy, and whom he would one day show in two pieces to the people of England as soon as he had done with him. That time had now come. Even after the failure of the marriage scheme with Anne of Cleves there was nothing immediately to warn Cromwell of the coming storm. The marriage took place in January, 1540. In April, Baron Cromwell of Oakham became Earl of Essex. Then the stroke fell swiftly and surely. On June loth of that year, when he entered the council chamber, Norfolk, his old enemy, rose, and without a word of warning arrested him on a charge of high treason. That mean-minded timeserver, sitting as Lord High Steward of the Council, was not above the cowardly brutality of tearing the chain of office ferociously from his fallen rival’s neck, while William Fitzwilliam, Earl of Southampton, who had been known as a friend of Cromwell, had to content himself with plucking the Order of the Garter from his breast, in token of the value of his friendship. The latter, Southampton, is the man whom Froude in one of his most eloquent moods of special pleading finds it possible to describe as the “Nelson of his time.” Both he and Norfolk were, as we shall presently see, sitters to Holbein. For the moment it is enough to say that there was little that was heroic or chivalrous in either of them. They showed nearest to their true colour on this occasion. There was more of dignity on that day in the figure of the ruined minister as he stood alone and faced his enemies: “I call you to witness have I played the traitor?” “ Make a quick end, my lords,” he added, and fiercely flung his cap upon the ground. He diedfby the weapons he had forged. It was under his regime that a few foolish words, tortured to a treasonable meaning, had led loyal Englishmen to the block. It was some empty utterances of his own that were 162 THOMAS CROMWELL(?) WILTON HOUSE ■m- tfAWT; \ B; ^ r.-^ ,■. . .;. i ^ . ** ^ ! .•*. . • .V* ^^ • ^■;>^J <■• 'r\, li.^;././.-?-' f?<4 *; ■- ^■■y‘'‘-=;;i^^-. » jif’Jte*-*;. _ m-'m U\t ;>. ,. y-. Ts t*,". -'. -'■*>’ ■ f ^^)JJHy/lV!OJl'J 2AMOHT JI8U0M HOT.HW used against him now. He had passed the atrocious statute by which a person attainted could be condemned unheard. And he was destined to be the first and only Englishman who died without a hearing. Even his last prayer, “Make a quick end,” was not listened to. A few days generally sufficed in that reign, even in a case of so much difficulty as the guilt of Anne Boleyn. Cromwell was left seven weeks in prison, while it was under debate if he should be burnt as a heretic or die by the halter or the axe. Henry used the same kind of mercy to him which had touched the humour of Sir Thomas More, and gave him the privilege of dying by the axe— used, it is said, in clumsy and butcherly fashion—in the July of that year. This was the man whom Holbein painted in the year 1534. As we look at the drawing of Wilton House and the painting of Tittenhanger, once more we feel that the former answers best to our conception of the man. For in private life it is on record that Cromwell was genial and full of humour, kindly and accessible, and his outward mien, just as in the case of others, such as Caesar Borgia himself, Catherine dei Medici, and a few more whose names call up ill memories, showed no traces of cruel purpose, still less of truculence, but was pleasant to look upon and even fascinating. The drawing at Wilton House seems to give us something of all this. It is the very determined, very self-possessed face of one who has known all sorts and conditions of men in all sorts of circumstances, and it has in it that half-grim half-contemptuous air of bonhommie which is said to have belonged to this disciple of Machiavelli. The dry and dusty wrinkles round the eyes seem half within and half without and full of knowledge of the world. And on the other hand we can fancy such a face belonging to the man who could set down in cool and businesslike fashion from day to day the entries which make our blood run cold. Turn from this superb drawing to the oil painting of Tittenhanger, and we find ourselves looking at a face which might have belonged to a narrow-brained Spanish inquisitor. The heavy bloodless face, the small close-set eyes, the low narrow forehead, the sinister expression make up a picture which the worst enemy of Cromwell’s name could not well improve upon. But the power, the clear¬ sightedness, the courage, the intellect of the man are absent from it. Even when the largest allowances are made for the loss which it has suffered from repaintings one can only turn away from it with a sense of disappointment. It was not, however, through Cromwell that Holbein obtained his entry to the Court. For a whole year, indeed, after the portrait must have been finished, namely, through 1534 and well into 1535, his list of sitters shows the names only of English gentlemen who were happy in that they made no part of history. Such were Reskymeer, the light-haired Cornishman whose portrait hangs at Hampton Court, while the drawing for 163 it rests at Windsor; Simon George, another Cornishman, whose portrait is in the Stadel Institute at Frankfurt; John Pointz, whose portrait, a noble drawing, is at Windsor; to be followed, however, a little later by several which show that his circle was again enlarging and began to include some who belonged to the Court. Thus we find in the Windsor series, Nicholas Bourbon, the French ambassador and poet; Lady Audley—a very lovely drawing—the wife of that Lord Audley, builder of Audley End, who, though he was not himself a man of great force or acumen, was fated to have a share in more important state trials for treason than has ever fallen to the lot of any other English lawyer—Fisher, More, Cromwell, Catherine Howard, and many others, all receiving their sentence from his mouth. Holbein’s miniature of this same lady is also at Windsor. To the year 1535 belongs also the Windsor drawing of the Duchess of Suffolk, fourth wife of Charles Brandon, of whose little son, Henry Brandon, Holbein made at about the same time the charming miniature, also at Windsor. It is said that Holbein learnt the art of miniature painting from Lucas Horne- bolt,^ the Court painter, who, with his sister Susanna, praised for this art by Diirer, enjoyed no small practice. But Holbein had little need to learn from anyone else. Already he had, as we have seen, executed work on a very small scale, as for instance the medallion portrait of Erasmus, and the Derich Born at Munich, which are little more than enlarged miniatures. All that Holbein had to learn from a man like Hornebolt was, at most, some practical details as to material. It was a branch of art in which Holbein was peculiarly fitted to excel. His sense of largeness, even when he worked on the smallest scale, and the exquisite skill of his craftsman¬ ship, make the little set of miniatures which are preserved at Windsor no less desirable as portraits and as completely expressive of character as his full-sized pictures. There is, in fact, no dividing line at any point in Hol¬ bein’s art through all the stages from his smallest miniature to his largest panels. The tiny miniature of little Henry Brandon is as large in style as the portrait of the Ambassadors; his portrait of the Ambassadors is as consummate in execution as his smallest miniature. ‘ The name is spelt in many different ways, Hornebaud, Horebout, etc., etc. I have adopted the Anglicized version in common use in his own day. CHAPTER XVIII THE KING’S PAINTER {1536). HENRY AND HIS QUEENS. EDWARD PRINCE OF WALES W E have distinct internal evidence from the pictures which came from Holbein’s hand in 1536 that he was already employed about the Court, although there is no entry before 1538 in the Household expenses of any payment made to him officially. And it is therefore probable that during the years 1536 and 1537 he had not received any formal appoint¬ ment, accompanied by a salary, as Court painter, but that he was merely receiving payment for each portrait as he painted it. Seeing that his work had now been known here and there to men of position in England for full ten years, seeing also how incomparably superior even as mere likeness, apart from any other quality of art, his work showed itself to that of any other artist in the country, it seems strange that his recognition by the Court should have been so long deferred. It cannot be said that the com¬ petition which he had to face was severe. The sergeant-painter of the moment, Antonio Toto, an Italian, was well suited to the odd jobs, the painting of flags, the decoration of furniture, the dressing of the tables for a feast, which were absolutely included in the artistic duties of an English Court painter. Lucas Hornebolt of Ghent indeed had a somewhat higher title to respect than Toto, and that he remained, even after Holbein’s great achievements, in higher estimation, is proved by the fact that his salary always exceeded by some pounds that of Holbein himself, which, so far as can be ascertained, never rose above ;^30 a year. The taste of England at that period was probably as little instructed as that of any country in Europe. Henry indeed is said to have had a love of art and to have prized his own collection of pictures so highly that he never allowed the key of it to pass from his own possession. But in the light of his account-books we may be allowed to doubt if his connoisseurship was of a very high order. And it is evident that the taste of his Court did not rise above the standard of its master. Portrait is often understood and enjoyed even by men who have no intrinsic liking for art, and it is noticeable that scarcely an instance can be found during the whole of Holbein’s English period in which he received a commission from an English source for any form of picture, save portraits only. The days of the “ Meier Madonna ” had passed away from him for ever 165 —not from his hopes, however, for he still cherished the dream of returning to his own cduntry to paint once more with a freer hand the subjects of his heart. Henry VIII.’s well-known love of personal display, and his pride in his personal appearance, would naturally lead us to suppose that he would have given many sittings to such a painter as Holbein. George IV. is said to have given over sixty to poor Lawrence for his legs alone, which he greatly admired, but Henry, certainly no less vain, seems for some reason to have had little fancy for the process, and though the country houses of England are well supplied with copies of Henry after Holbein, extremely few undoubted originals from the master’s hand exist in any shape. And one only, the wonderful drawing at Munich, can be said with certainty to be the result of a sitting from the king. That there were other studies —certainly one for the full-length portrait of the great Whitehall group— we feel pretty sure. But the absence of all such studies at the present day, beyond the Munich example, shows that they must have been but few. We may, however, regret this the less since there have survived to us that consummate sketch, and also the great cartoon in black and white at Hardwick Hall, which Holbein used to transfer a portion of his picture to the wall of Whitehall. The Munich drawing is of the head only, in coloured chalk on paper prepared with body colour in his usual manner, the modelling produced by the simplest possible means with rubbings of reddish chalk upon the grained surface. The subtlety of this modelling is such that it wholly eludes the power of reproduction, and is apt to become through photography a dark and solid mass. The drawing itself can alone give its own astonishing effect, and I am hardly using the language of exaggeration when I say that he who has stood long before that drawing will feel for the rest of his life that he has stood before and seen Henry VHI., and he will carry the image in his mind for all his days. The bony struc¬ ture of the skull, which is clearly indicated, shows that it was not really a large head, the eyes, whose position of course in a face remain unalter¬ able no matter how much the face becomes loaded with fat, seeming close together and small merely because of the great expanse of added flesh upon the cheeks, which droop in heavy and flaccid folds below the level of the small round apple-shaped chin. The mouth, again, seems small for the same reason, but is firm and full of self-will. The eyes are absolutely with¬ out any definable expression save that same almost appalling expression of “ self,” which seems in some mysterious sphinx-like fashion to creep about the whole face. There is no character in history so difficult to fathom— none around which so fierce a battle has raged, and always will rage, as that of Henry VIII. Men have interpreted it into many very different shapes, and viewed it from strangely different points of view. 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