If we may accept the balance of evidence, Hans Holbein was born in the last years of the fifteenth century in Augsburg, then a city of great importance. The visitor to Bavaria to-day will find few traces of its vanished prosperity, but in the years when Hans Holbein was a little boy Augsburg held merchant princes by the dozen, and men of distinction by the score, and enjoyed the favour of the Emperor Maximilian, himself no mean patron of the arts. In such a city at the beginning of the sixteenth century there would have been a certain community [30] of interest between the leaders of state, commerce, and religion, who, keenly conscious of the honour that had come to Italy through the Revival of Learning and the practice of the arts, would do all that in them lay to devote a part of their wealth and leisure to placing their city in an honourable position. Civic pride was rampant throughout the great cities of Europe in the Middle Ages, and Augsburg was no exception to the rule. Holbein's father, whose work may be studied to great advantage in Berlin, was an artist of repute. He belonged to the Guild of Painters that had been successfully established in the city, and enjoyed the patronage of the leisured classes to an extent that brought a measure of prosperity to all its members. The practice of the arts was comparatively new to [31] Augsburg, and doubtless the story of Italian prosperity had lost nothing on its journey across the Tyrol. The Bavarian city would expect its prosperous Guild to achieve distinction, and was ready and able to respond to progress, so that the conditions were very favourable to endeavour and to success. Every great city sought to achieve renown by raising in its midst, or attracting to its circle, scholars and artists of world-wide repute. Hans Holbein had a double advantage. Not only was the time ripe for his achievements, but the family surroundings were of the kind calculated to develop his powers early. His father, nephew, and brothers were painters, and from his earliest years he would have been brought into intimate touch with the life and work of artists. He would have had access to the hall of the [32] Painters' Guild, where as much as could be secured of the world's fine work was to be seen. The Guild was the centre of a great city's enthusiasms; the work was criticised and studied. Great financiers of Augsburg brought artists and craftsmen from other towns, and it is safe to assume that the best of them would have been found in the hall of the Guild from time to time exhibiting their own work, and telling an interested gathering of the wonders of other cities in days when the journey across the frontiers of one's own country was not to be safely or lightly undertaken. The elder Holbein would have introduced his son into the best artistic circles of his time and place; for although he does not seem to have been the leading artist of his city, he received important commissions from the religious houses, and the collection of sketches in the Berlin National Gallery shows how much the son owed to the father, and what a clever fellow the father was.

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Unfortunately history has nothing to tell us of the boyhood of young Hans, though we may gather that his father was in straitened circumstances and not on the best of terms with members of his family who were better off than he. Perhaps we may assume that the res angusta domi turned young Han's steps from his father's house while he was yet little more than a boy, for when he could have been no more than seventeen, and was perhaps younger, he and his brother Ambrosius would seem to have left Augsburg for Basle, where so much of his work is to be found to-day. Here in his first youth he painted a rather poor Madonna and Christ, [36] which was discovered little more than thirty years ago after centuries of neglect, and is remarkable chiefly for the tiny Renaissance cherubs on the frame, figures painted with so much freshness, ease, and vigour that one is inclined to overlook the poor quality of the picture they enshrine. It would seem that at the time when this work was painted the elder Holbein had taken his family from Augsburg to Lucerne, and that he was at once admitted to the Painters' Guild there.

It was well for Holbein that he selected Basle as a place of residence, for the chances of his life threw him at a very impressionable age into the company of men who found a fresh field for his talents, and widened very considerably the scope of his achievement. He was not destined to remain constant to painting.

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In 1515 Frobenius and Amerbach the great printers were at Basle, Erasmus had been and gone, and Frobenius must have been attracted by some of the clever sensational work with which Holbein made his artistic debut, for when the third edition of the famous "Breve ad Erasmum" was published by Frobenius, the title-page was designed by Holbein. He was not turning his attention to this class of work to the detriment of others, for we associate with the stay in Basle some half-dozen of the second-rate efforts in paint of a man who is striving to find himself and is at the stage in his life where he is little more than the echo of greater men who have influenced him. Holbein was already a man of all art work; he prepared the title-page of Sir Thomas More's "Utopia," and painted religious [38] pictures or table tops with equal assurance and facility. He was never one of the young men with a mission who shun delights and live laborious days working from dawn to dusk in pursuit of an ideal, and wake one morning to find Fame has arrived overnight. And yet on a sudden he found himself, as his sketches for the portrait of Jacob Meier and Dorothea Kannegiesser testify. Darmstadt and Dresden hold the ripe fruits of his friendship with Jacob Meier, and it would seem that his earliest commission there served to bring him the measure of inspiration that lifts uncertain talent to the height of a great achievement, never to fall back to the ranks of those who struggle year in year out, achieving nothing of permanent value. Certainly he was well served by his sitters, for the man and the woman seem to have been born to be painted.

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We do not know what followed when Holbein had found himself. It is stated by some authorities that he left Basle for Lucerne, where he had some trouble with the authorities, and did a certain amount of decorative work. Altdorf is named as a city in which he resided for a time, and it is suggested, not without justification, that he went into Northern Italy and studied some of the master-works of the Renaissance. But by the time he had reached man's estate he had returned to Basle, bringing with him a reputation that he was destined to develop steadily for the rest of his life, and hand down to posterity to be the glory of German art.

His history after being lost for a time finds some record in 1519, when he was admitted to the Art Guild of Basle, and a year [42] later he became a free man of the city and married a widow with two children. Her portrait may be seen in Basle to-day, and there is one that is said to stand for the painter himself, also a work of his hand. The drawing depicts a strong man, who looks out upon the world with serene consciousness that he can play a full and worthy part in it.

When he was a married man and a citizen of Basle, Holbein developed to a very considerable extent his earlier acquaintance with the Humanists. His work was always at the service of the great printers, and, not unnaturally, the authors who were in touch with them took an interest in the young artist who added so much to the attractions of their books. His religious feelings we do not know, but he associated [43] himself with the publication of certain Lutheran pamphlets of marked scurrility, and would seem to have taken his full share in the contest between the Reformers and their opponents. The history of the differences that ultimately drove Erasmus from the city is full of interest and instruction, but the limits of space forbid the disgression necessary to deal with them. Erasmus lives for us in several portraits by Holbein, and there can be no doubt but that association with the leading literary men of the city must have done a great deal to develop in the painter the measure of culture that was to serve him in good stead when he left the city of Basle for places more important and the service of exalted patrons. His designs for wood engravings in the years following his marriage are of the first importance, and include [44] the famous Dance of Death series. He painted among many works of the first class a portrait of his patron Boniface Amerbach, the famous "Dead Man," said by some to be a picture of the dead Christ, a portrait of Erasmus and the "Zetter Madonna." Of these the "Dead Man" is in Basle, one of Erasmus is there, and another is in the Louvre, while the "Zetter Madonna" is at Soluthurn. Of course he did a great deal of work that cannot be enumerated here—work of the most varied description and almost unvarying excellence, and it is clear that he owed not a little of his achievement to the steadiness of his labours. We may reasonably suppose that some of the output is lost, but what is left to this day in Basle amazes us. The Museum is a monument of his talent and industry. Half faded [45] frescoes, panel paintings, subject pictures, portraits, drawings, studies of costume, the eight scenes of the Passion—there is enough in the Museum to console the stranger for all the season of his stay in a singularly unattractive city. We owe the existing collection in a very large extent to Boniface Amerbach, the artist's friend and early patron, who, recognising the permanent value of his output, collected all he could secure, and established the nucleus of a collection that forms to-day Basle's chief claim to distinction. If others had been equally far seeing, many a treasure now lost or destroyed would remain to inspire and to teach; but we must be content with the thought that the work lost through carelessness was probably not the best, and for the rest fire and Puritans are jointly responsible, and it [46] is impossible to argue satisfactorily with either.

Fame travelled slowly in the sixteenth century, but it had not so far to go as it must to-day. The art centres were small and few, they belonged exclusively to the western world, and there were no swarms of influential mediocrities to secure work that belonged of right to better men. Then again, even in those days, when war was still considered in certain quarters to be the only occupation for a gentleman, art knew no boundaries in the civilised world, and the artist, as a valued contributor to the beauty of life, could pass through countries in which his countrymen of other pursuits would have received scant welcome. Of course there were exceptions to this general rule, and curiously enough Basle, in which the Lutherans were [47] gaining ground so rapidly, had become an impossible place for Holbein by the summer of 1526. Moreover, there was trouble with the famous or notorious Dorothea Offenburg, who would seem to have been a mistress of the painter. Apparently his marriage was dictated more by convenience than affection, and the catholicity of his taste was not limited to things of art. Holbein painted the fair Dorothea twice, apparently in 1526, once as "Venus" and once as "Lais of Corinth." Each portrait may be seen in the large salon of the Museum, and the attractions of the lady must have been more apparent to the painter than they are to us. Some say that it was his desire to flee from before the face of his inamorata that turned Holbein's feet towards London, others that it was the strength of the [48] Lutheran movement that made men look askance at the arts. Be that as it may he came to town, and Basle's loss was England's gain.

It may be remarked here, that while Holbein's long stay in Basle had not been interrupted, there is evidence to suggest, if not to prove, that he followed Amerbach to France. Doubtless his position enabled him to gratify any reasonable desire to travel; and in houses long since demolished, for families long fallen from their high estate if not altogether lost, he may have painted portraits and decorated private chapels or turned his rare gift as miniaturist to good account. No flÂneur on the high-road of sixteenth-century life, no chronicler of the times and changes of his generation, has anything to record, because the world then took no count of the coming or going of the great men who claimed fame through the arts.

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