Hans Holbein the younger is perhaps the most outstanding figure in the history of German art. In the eyes of some he may yield place to his great contemporary Albert DÜrer, but it is impossible [12] to deny that for all his indisputable genius DÜrer stood for a time that was passing, and Holbein for one that was to come. The younger man touched art at every point, nowhere without mastery; and whether we consider him as a draughtsman, a decorator, a painter of frescoes, a portrait painter, an architect, a modeller, a designer of jewellery, a book illustrator, or a miniaturist, we find ourselves face to face with such an extraordinary measure of achievement, that the claim to remembrance and admiration could be sustained if his art gift had been single instead of universal.

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Some men are echoes of their own time. Circumstance has made them what they are; their work, however greatly it may please their generation, does nothing to probe the future, to indicate the direction that thought or taste will follow, nor does it set an example for those who are to come. Hans Holbein the younger is of the smaller and more distinguished class that accepts tradition just so far as it is useful or indispensable, and can face the problems of changing seasons and new thought with perfect confidence and unerring instinct, finding no terror in change. His father was an artist, and this fact would seem to have marked out his path in life. But, considering the work he did, in its extent and quality, we have every reason to believe that the artist was born to succeed, and that had he been an engineer, a general, or a statesman, he would have left the same indelible mark upon his generation, and would have been remembered with gratitude and admiration by those who came after him. For he was the strong man armed [16] at all points, who chose to be an artist, though many another path before him would have led to fame.

It is not difficult, if one has a certain measure of talent, to impose upon one's contemporaries. Criticism is seldom exhaustive or final until time has taken its stand between man and his labours, adjusting the earlier perspective that is seldom correct and never exact, but with Holbein the case was different. His generation recognised a genius to which we pay tribute after 350 years have passed away.

"I could make six peers out of six ploughmen," said Henry VIII., who was no mean judge; "but out of six peers I could not make one Holbein."

We who come to pay our tribute of admiration so long after opinion, good or bad, has [17] ceased to concern the artist, are at no small disadvantage. We can learn little or nothing about the personal details of his life; the year of his birth and even the place are in dispute, while between the various authorities who deal with the date of his death there is a difference of no less than twelve years, although the balance of evidence is greatly in favour of the earlier date and shorter life. Moreover, a great part of the artist's output is lost. In these days, when the work of old masters is being discovered so frequently, and many a forgotten chef d'oeuvre is being rescued from oblivion, there is every reason to hope that the future has something valuable in store for us. But we know that, as far as this country is concerned, much of the labour of Holbein's hands has passed beyond recall. During the Commonwealth many of [18] the artist's pictures were sent to the Continent, the great fire in the Whitehall destroyed some priceless works, and the drawings that attract so many artists to Windsor have had a very chequered career. As far as we can learn, they were collected in the first place by King Edward VI., and were then sold in France, where their owner sold them back to Charles I., who, in his turn, disposed of them to the Earl of Pembroke, from whom they passed to the Earl of Arundel, who disposed of them to King Charles II., who was probably advised in the transaction by Sir Peter Lely. Then they were taken to Kensington Palace, thrown into a drawer and forgotten until, in the time of the Georges, Queen Caroline discovered some and King George III. found the rest. When Queen Victoria ruled over us the Prince Consort gave these masterpieces [19] their present frames and places, and we may presume that they will never be disturbed. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the experience of this famous collection is typical of that which has befallen many other works from the same hand. Our interest in fine art is comparatively modern; only in the last hundred years have the rank and file of cultured, wealthy, or leisured people bethought them of the great treasures that lay neglected in the highways and byways of big cities; and we must not forget that damp, neglect, and indifference are troubles that have a very serious and unfavourable effect upon works of art. The favour extended to a fine picture must be enduring, nor will ten generations of careful attention atone for ten years of bad housing and neglect.

We owe a great deal to Holbein, because [20] he was one of the few great painters of the sixteenth century who pictured the commercial age that others had held in contempt. He seems to have seen that Europe had reached the parting of the ways, and that war was no longer to stand as the greatest interest of national life. To realise how the temper of the world has changed, we need do no more than remember that if the sword is drawn in the twentieth century it is in the service of commerce.

The Renaissance that worked so many wonders in Italy opened Holbein's eyes and broadened his point of view, but after the first few years he turned aside from the Italian influence and looked upon the life around him with eyes that had been aided rather than blinded by the bright light that shone over Milan, Florence, and Venice. He [21] was a realist with an exquisite sense of proportion, and a definite certainty of intention and expression, that kept him from playing tricks with his art. As great opportunities came to him, he took such complete advantage of them that to-day we may turn to his work and read in it the history of his own fascinating times. He has left us a gallery of the people who ruled a considerable section of middle and western Europe in the first half of the sixteenth century, when the near East was still untouched by Christian civilisation, and few artists looked beyond the Adriatic for sitters or for patronage.

No small part of the Tudor period lives again under Holbein's hand. He gives us the vivid and enduring impression of an age that had found itself, and his subjects walk with [22] fact, just as the creations of his great contemporary Albert DÜrer had walked with fancy. As he saw them so he portrayed them, and history brings no charge of flattery against him save in the case of Anne of Cleves, whose portrait he painted for King Henry VIII. before that much married monarch had seen her. Here he is said to have been guilty of flattery, but it was generally believed at the time that Thomas Cromwell, who was his patron and had commissioned the portrait, was responsible for it. The fact that King Henry himself accepted this view, and that Cromwell suffered for it, suggests that there must be no little foundation for the story, though the king certainly understood the worth of a great artist too well to quarrel with him.

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Apart from this work, we look to Holbein for a long roll of kings, princes, churchmen, statesmen, doctors, lawyers, men of letters, reformers, and social celebrities all in their habit as they lived, and vested with the dignity that seems to have been an integral part of the Tudor period. It would seem to have been a curiously practical and business-like age, with rather less imagination than we associate with Elizabethan times. In dealing with one and all of his varied sitters, the painter seems to have preserved the essential characteristics, and, if we must admit the Holbein touch, there is at least no Holbein type. He started his work under the influence of the Renaissance, and with an almost childish delight in decorative effects. As he progressed he threw aside one by one the details that he had ceased to regard as essential, until in the end he could express everything he [26] saw in the simplest possible manner, without any suggestion of superfluity or redundancy, without concession to the merely superficial side of picture-making that stood lesser men in good stead. The extraordinary success of his portraiture is best understood when we learn that for most of his work he did not trouble sitters after the modern fashion. They sat to him for a sketch, and then he took the sketch away with him and produced in due course the finished portrait. When we look at the portraits in the great European galleries, at Windsor or Basle, the Louvre or Munich, we may be astonished that such results should be achieved from mere sketches. But the study of these sketches themselves avails to explain much; and as there are more than eighty of them at Windsor, and these have [27] been reproduced very finely in several volumes, the lover of Holbein has no occasion to leave this country in order to understand the technique of this branch of the master's work. Naturally an artist is judged very readily by his efforts in portraiture, for they are the things that appeal most readily to the eye; but in the case of Holbein, who would have been a great master if he had never painted a portrait, it is well to look in other directions for evidences of his many gifts. What manner of man he was, how and when he lived and died, is, as we have hinted already, a matter of conjecture; and in setting down the facts of his life that are generally accepted, it is necessary to admit reservations at short intervals. Of course, we would give much to know the full story of his progress, to learn the conditions [28] under which some of his most notable achievements were accomplished, to catch some really reliable glimpses of his domestic life, but in all these matters we have nothing but stray facts and countless conjectures. Even the portrait in Basle that is said to stand for him is a doubtful authority, because it is not clear from the original inscription whether it is of Holbein or by Holbein. We know that he painted it, but we do not know whether he was painting himself. Happily, perhaps, the satisfaction of this curiosity, though it be human and reasonable enough, is not of the first importance. It may suffice us amply that the great artist left many and varied monuments of his achievements, and that the most, or very many, of these are open to our inspection to this day, that they have preserved their [29] quality and their power to teach as well as to charm succeeding generations.