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| Historical epoch and antecedents—Special conditions and character of early Christian art—Ideals and influence of the monk—Holbein's relation to mediÆval schools—His father, uncle, and Augsburg home—Probable dates for his birth and his father's death—Troubles and dispersion of the Augsburg household—From Augsburg to Basel—His brother Ambrose—Erasmus and the Praise of Folly; some erroneous impressions of both—Erasmus and Holbein no Protestants at heart—Holbein and the Bible—Illustrated vernacular Bibles in circulation before Luther and Holbein were born—Holbein's earliest Basel oil paintings—Direct and indirect education—Historical, geographical, and scientific revolutions of his day—Beginning of his connection with the Burgomaster of Basel—Jacob Meyer zum Hasen—Holbein's woodcuts—His studies from nature—Sudden visit to Lucerne—Italian influence on his art—Work for the Burgomaster of Lucerne. |
The eighty-three years stretching from 1461 to 1543—between the probable year of the elder Hans Holbein's birth and that in
Each of these had done its own special work for the advancement of man—as for that matter all things must, whether by help or helplessness. Not less than Elijah did the wretched priests of Baal serve those slow, sure, eternal Purposes, which include an Ahab and all the futile fury of his little life as the sun includes its "spots."
But although the stream of History is one,
Yet we shall never get near to these real men, to their real world, unless we can forget all about the pose of this or the other Zeitgeist—that tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
For we must keep constantly in mind that what we call the Middle Ages or—worse yet—the Dark Ages, made up the Yesterday of the Holbeins and was the flesh and blood transmitted to them as their own flesh and blood with all its living bonds toward the Old and all its living impulses toward the New.
A now famous New Zealander is, we know, to sketch our own "mediÆvalism" with contemptuous pity for its darkness. But until his day comes, our farthing-dips seem to make a gaudy illumination. And, meantime, we are
The New is ever becoming old; the old ever changing into New. And if we ask why each waxes or wanes just when it does and as it does, there is, in the last analysis, no better answer than Aurora's explanation for chancing on the poets—
Because the time was ripe.
And the Holbein century is one of stupendous Transitions because the time was ripe; and not simply because printing was invented, or Greek scholars were driven from Constantinople to scatter abroad in Europe, or Ferdinand and Isabella wanted a direct route to Cathay, or Friar Martin nailed ninety-five Theses to the door of Wittenberg's church, and built himself thereby an everlasting name as Luther.
And because the time was ripe for a new Art, even more than because this or that great painter entrained it, it also had its transition period, and Holbein is set down in manuals as a transitional painter. Teutonic, too; because all Christian art is either Byzantine or Italian or Teutonic in its type.
When it first crept from the catacombs under
A great deal of nonsense is talked about the "tyrannies" which the Monastic Age inflicted on Art. Of course, monasticism fostered fanaticism. It does not need the luminous genius that said it, to teach us that "whatever is necessary to what we make our sole object is sure, in some way or in some time or other, to become
The springs of Helicon were the monk's also, as witness Tuotilo and Bernard of Clairvaux; but it was by the waters of Jordan that his miracles were wrought. As Johnson somewhere says of Watts, "every kind of knowledge was by the piety of his mind converted into theology." And for the rest,—by the labour of his hands, by his fasting from the things of the flesh, by his lofty faith—however erring or forgotten or betrayed, in individual cases,—by every impressive lesson of a hard life lived unto others and a hard death died unto himself, century after century it was the monk who taught and helped the barbarian of every land to turn the desolate freedom of the wild ass into
To say that he abhorred Greek ideals is to say that the shepherd abhors the wolf. His life was one long fight with the insidious poison of the Greek. He did not,—at any rate in his best days—believe at all in Art for Art's sake; and had far too intimate an acquaintance with the "natural man" to do him even justice. What he wanted was to do away with him.
Yet with all its repellent features, it is to this unflinching exclusiveness of the monkish ideal that we owe one of the most exquisite blossoms on the stock of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,—their innocent and appealing art; an art as original and as worthy of reverence, within its own peculiar province, as the masterpieces of Greece or Italy. You must turn from the beauty of Antinous to the beauty of, say, the Saint Veronica, among the works of the Cologne school at Munich, before you can estimate the Gulf of many things besides time which for ever divides the world of the one from the world of the other. And then you
With the school of Wilhelm Meister this tremendous revolution had accomplished itself; and solely through the indomitable will of the monk. The ideal of Greece had been to show how gods walk the earth. This Christian ideal was to show how devout men and women walk with God. Their ineffable heavenly faces look out from their golden world—
Inviolate, unwearied,
Divinest, sweetest, best,
upon this far-off, far other world, where nothing is inviolate, and divinest things must come at last to tears and ashes.
But the monk had had his day as well as his way. The so-called Gothic architecture had expressed its uttermost of aspiration and tenuity; and painting had fulfilled its utmost accommodation to the ever more slender wall-spaces and forms which this architecture necessitated. And once again, in the fifteenth century, the time was ripe for a new transition. Art was now to reveal the realities of this world, and to concern itself with Man among them. And
Yet we should make a grave mistake if we were to regard Holbein as cut off by this reaction from all affinities with the monkish ideals of the Cologne school. On the contrary. We shall see, especially in his religious pictures, how many of those ideals had fed the very springs of his imagination and sunk deep into his art; only expressing themselves in his own symbolism and in forms unlike theirs.
In the Augsburg Gallery there is a painting by Holbein's father, the "Basilica of St. Paul," in which there is a group introduced after the
Hans Holbein the Elder, who stands here with his long brown hair and beard falling over his fur gown, was a citizen of Augsburg,
But that Augsburg was his fixed home for the greater part of his life is certain; and the rate-books show that after the leather-dresser
There is nothing to show who was the wife of Sigmund Holbein's elder brother, Hans. But by 1499 this elder Hans had either a child or children mentioned with him (sein kind, applying equally to one or more). In all probability this is the earliest discoverable record of Hans Holbein the Younger, and his elder brother Ambrose. In all probability, too, Hans was then about two years old, and "Prosy" a year or two older. At one time it was vaguely thought that the elder Hans had three sons; and Prosy, or "Brosie," as it was sometimes written, got converted into a "Bruno" Holbein. But no vestige of an actual Bruno is to be found. And as Ambrose
Hans the elder lived far on in his younger son's life. His works attest that he had talents and ideals of no mean order. But I do not propose to enter here upon the vexed question as to how far the "Renaissance" characteristics of the later works attributed to his hand are his own or his son's. Learned and exhaustive arguments have by turns consigned the best of these works to the father, to the son, and back again to the father. In at least one instance of high authority the same writer has, at different periods, held a brief for both sides and for opposite opinions! In this connection, as on the battlefield of some of the son's greatest paintings, the single-minded student of Holbein may not unprofitably draw three conclusions from the copious literature on the subject:—First, that a working hypothesis is not of necessity the right one; secondly, that in the matter of his pronouncements the critical expert also may occasionally be regarded as
Un animal qui s'habille, dÉshabille et babille toujours;
But my chief reason for not pursuing the Protean phantom of Holbein's Augsburg period is that,—apart from my own disagreement with many accepted views about the works it includes, and the utter lack of data for determining any position irrefutably,—it is comparatively unimportant to the purpose of this little book. For wherever the younger painter was born,—whether at Augsburg or Ulm or elsewhere,—and whatever I believe to be his rightful claim to such paintings as the St. Elizabeth and St. Barbara of the St. Sebastian altar-piece at Munich, Fame, like Van Mander, has rightly written him down Holbein Basiliensis.
It is true that his father's brushes were his alphabet. It may be true, though I doubt it, that his father's teaching was his only technical school. But if he was, as to the last he gloried in being, the child of the Old Period, he was much more truly the immediate pupil of the
When he turned his back on the low-vaulted years of Augsburg, it was because for him also the time was ripe. The Old Period had cast his genius; the New was to expand it to new powers and purposes.
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year's dwelling for the new;
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretch'd in his last-found home and knew the old no more.
It may easily have been the elder Hans' continuous troubles, whether due to his fault or his misfortune it is idle now to inquire, which made his sons leave Augsburg. Certain it is that he but escaped from the clutches of one suit for debt after another in order to tumble into some fresh disaster of the sort, until his own brother Sigmund appears among his exasperated creditors. After 1524 Hans
At all events his sons did leave Augsburg about 1514; or, at any rate, Hans did, since there is a naÏve little Virgin and Child in the Basel Museum, dated 1514, which must have been painted in the neighbourhood of Constance in this year,—probably for the village church where it was discovered. As everything points to the conclusion that Holbein was born in 1497, he would have been some seventeen years old at this time, and "Prosy" eighteen or nineteen. Substantially, therefore, they must have looked pretty much as in the drawing which their father had made of them three years before; that precious drawing in silver-point which is now in the Berlin Collection (Plate 2). Over the elder, still with the curly locks of the group in the "St. Paul Basilica," is written Prosy; over the younger, Hanns. The age of the latter, fourteen, may still be deciphered above his portrait, but that of Ambrose has quite vanished. Between the two is the family name, written in Augsburg fashion, Holbain. At the top of the sheet stands the year of the drawing, almost illegible, but believed to be 1511.
| PLATE_2 |
| PLATE 2. "PROSY" AND "HANNS" HOLBAIN [Drawn by their father, Hans Holbein the elder] Silver-point. Berlin Cabinet Click to ENLARGE |
Of the elder brother all that is certainly known may be said here once for all. In 1517 he entered the Painters' Guild at Basel, where he is called "Ambrosius Holbein, citizen of Augsburg." He made a number of designs for wood-engraving, title-pages, and ornaments, for the printers of Basel—all of fair merit. He may also have worked in the studio of Hans Herbster, a Basel painter of considerable note. Herbster's portrait in oils, long held to be a fine work of the younger brother,—now that it has passed from the Earl of Northbrook's collection to that of the Basel Museum, is attributed to Ambrose Holbein. But little else is known of him; and after 1519, as has been said, the absence of any record of him among the living suggests that he died in that year.
In the late summer of 1515 came that momentous trifle which has for ever linked the name of young Hans Holbein with that of Erasmus. Whether, as some say, the scholar gave him the order, or, as seems more likely, some friend of both had the copy, now in the Basel Museum, on the margins of which the lad drew his spirited pen-and-ink sketches,—it is on record that they were made before the
They have been made to do duty, in default of all genuine proofs, as supports to the theory by which Protestant writers have claimed both Erasmus and Holbein as followers of Luther in their hearts, without sufficient courage or zeal to declare themselves such. I confess that, though myself no less ardent as a Protestant than as an admirer of Holbein, I cannot, for the life of me, see any justification for either the claim or its implied charge of timorousness.
Erasmus's Praise of Folly—like so many a paradox started as a joke,—had no notion of being serious at all until it was seriously attacked. Some four years before its illustrations riveted the name of a stripling artist to that of the world-renowned scholar, Erasmus had fallen ill while a guest in the sunny Bucklersbury home where three tiny daughters and
And it was part and parcel of the joke that he launched his own sly arrow at the author
Yet even this feat of deduction is surpassed by that which argues that because Erasmus and Holbein lashed bad prelates and vicious monks with satire, therefore they detested the
As to Holbein's "Protestant sympathies"—using the name for the whole Lutheran movement in which Protestantism had its rise,—the assertions are even less grounded in fact, if that be possible. If he had it not already in his heart, through Erasmus and Amerbach and Froben and More and every other great influence to which he yielded himself at all, he early acquired a deep and devout sense of the
"DÜrer's woodcuts and engravings, especially his various scenes from the Passion," writes even Woltmann, the biographer to whom every student of Holbein owes so grateful a debt, "had prepared the soil among the people for Luther's translation of the Bible. Holbein's pictures from the Old Testament followed in their wake, and helped forward the work." Yet it seems difficult to suppose that
To lose hold of these things, to lose sight of the true attitude of Holbein in his Bible woodcuts and his "Images of Death," or of either Erasmus or Holbein in their satires on the flagrant abuses within their Church, and their unwavering devotion to that Church,—is to deliberately throw away the clue to the most vital qualities in the work of either, and to the whole course and character of Holbein himself, no less than to that of his lifelong friend and benefactor.
In 1515 the young painter who had come to Basel to better his fortunes painted a table for Hans BÄr's wedding. The bridegroom marched away, carrying the Basel colours, to the bloody field of Marignano (or Melegnano)
But although Holbein had got his foot on the ladder of fame in this year's beginning of his connection with Froben, he was as yet very thankful to accept any commission, however humble. And as a human document there is a touch of peculiar, almost pathetic interest about the Schoolmaster's Signboard preserved by Bonifacius Amerbach, and now with his collection in the Basel Museum (Plate 3). It is a simple thing, with no pretension to a place among "works of art"—this bit of flotsam from 1516, when it was painted. Originally
Somehow, looking at the young fellow at the right of the table, in the Adult Class, sitting facing the anxious schoolmaster, with his own brow all furrowed by the effort to follow him and his mouth doggedly set to succeed,—while the late, low sun of a summer afternoon streams in through the leaded window,—one muses on the chance that so may the young painter from Augsburg, now but nineteen, himself have sat upon this very bench and leaned across this very table, in a like determination to widen out his small
Somewhere, too, and no later than these first Basel years, he acquired the power to read and appreciate even the niceties of Latin, though he probably could not have done more than make these out to his own satisfaction. All his work of illustration is too original, too spontaneous, too full of flashes of subtle personal sympathy with the text, to have emanated from an interpreter, or been dictated by another mind than his own. And this very Signboard may have paid for lessons which he could not otherwise afford. For if there is any force in circumstantial evidence it is certain that Holbein not only wrote, but read and pondered and thought for himself in these years when he doubtless had many more hours of leisure than he desired, from a financial standpoint.
And the greatest pages of his autobiography, written with his brush, will be only so many childish rebuses if we forget what astounding pages of History and Argument were turned before him. In Augsburg he had seen the
Child and lad, his was a precocious intelligence; and it had been fed upon meat for strong men. He had heard of Alexander VI.'s colossal infamies, and those of CÆsar Borgia as well; and of the kingdoms ranging to this or that standard after the death of Pope and Prince. He was nine years old then. Old enough, too, to drink in the wonderful hero-tales of one Christopher Columbus of Genoa, whose fame was running through the Whispering Gallery of Europe, while he himself lay dying at Valladolid—ill, heartbroken, poor, disgraced,—yet proudly confident that he had demonstrated, past all denial, the truth of his own conviction, and touched the shores of Cathay, sailing westward from Spain. Da Gama, Vespucci, Balboa, Magellan,—theirs were indeed names and deeds to set the heart of youth leaping, between its cradle and its twenty-fifth year.
But it is no insignificant sidelight on the history of this circle and this period to recall that the subversive theories of Copernicus,—far as even he was from anticipating how a Kepler and a Newton should one day shatter the "Crystalline Spheres," and relegate to the dustheap of antiquity the "Epicycles," to which he still clung,—had their only generous hearing from influential churchmen of Rome. Luther recoiled from them as the blasphemies of "an arrogant fool"; and even Melanchthon urged that they should be "suppressed by the secular arm." Nor let it be forgotten that these matters were never a far cry from those Basel printing-presses where the greatest master-printers were themselves thorough and eager scholars; "Men of Letters," in the noblest sense of the word. And the discussion of all these high concerns of history and letters was as much a part of the daily life surging around
As has been said, the sister of that Hans BÄr for whom Holbein painted the "St. Nobody" table had been the first wife, Magdalena BÄr—a widow with one daughter, when she married him—of Jacob Meyer,2
| PLATE_4 | PLATE_5 |
| PLATE 4. JACOB MEYER (ZUM HASEN) Oils. Basel Museum Click to ENLARGE | PLATE 5. DOROTHEA MEYER (nÉe KANNEGIESSER) Oils. Basel Museum Click to ENLARGE |
Against the rich Renaissance architecture and the blue of the sky-vista the massive head of Meyer and the blonde one of his young wife,
In 1516 he had just been elected Mayor for the first time; but after this he had many consecutive re-elections in the alternate years which permitted this. For no burgomaster could hold office for two years in actual succession. Previous to being Mayor he had been an eminent personage as master of the guilds. And both before and after his mayoralty he was a distinguished soldier,—rising from ensign to captain in the Basel contingent which served at different times among the Auxiliaries of France and of the Pope.
But what made this election of 1516 a civic
In accordance with his invariable rule for portraits in oils, Holbein first made a careful drawing of each head on the same scale as the finished picture, carrying it out with great freedom but at the same time with astonishing care and finish. So that his studies for portraits are themselves works of art, sometimes invested with even more spirit than the oil painting, which was never made direct from
With these fine portraits, painted as if united by the same architectural background, Holbein began a friendship of many years. After some four centuries it is not possible to produce written records of such ties except in occasional corroborative details. But neither is it possible to mistake the painted records of repeated commissions. While as the lifelong leader of the Catholic party in Basel, it was natural that Meyer zum Hasen should have much in common with a painter who all his life held firmly to his friendships with the most conspicuous champions of that party.
Johann Froben was another of these; and from 1515 until Froben's death eleven years later Holbein had more and more to do for this printer. Occasionally, too, he drew for
This is not the place for any fraction of that hot debate which Kugler ironically styles "the great question of the sixteenth century"; the debate as to whether Holbein himself did or
We know, too, that those woodcuts which most attest Holbein's genius were engraved by that mysterious "Hans LÜtzelburger, form-cutter, called Franck" (Hans LÜtzelburger, Formschnider, genannt Franck), who still remains, after all the researches of enthusiastic admirers, a hand and a name, and beyond this—nothing. But it is when Holbein's designs are engraved with LÜtzelburger's astonishingly beautiful cutting that we can appreciate how wonderful was the design itself. To compare these fairy pictures with the painter's large cartoons is to get some conception of the arc his powers described. It seems incredible that the same hand could hang an equal majesty on the wall of a tiny shell and on that of a king's palace, and with equal justness of eye. Yet it is done. He will ride a donkey or an
It is not always possible to subscribe to Ruskin's flowing judgments; but I gratefully borrow the one with which he sums up thus, in a lecture on wood-engraving: Holbein does not give many gradations of light, the speaker says, "but not because Holbein cannot give chiaroscuro if he chooses. He is twenty times a stronger master of it than Rembrandt; but therefore he knows exactly when and how to use it, and that wood-engraving is not the proper means for it. The quantity of it which is needful for his story he will give, and that with an unrivalled subtlety."
And the student of Holbein's art can but feel that Ruskin has here touched upon a characteristic of the painter's peculiar power in every phase of it;—the power to be CÆsar within himself; to say to his hand, "thus far," to say to his fancy, "no farther." Those who have come to know Holbein something more than superficially, or as a mere maker of portraits, will smile at the dictum of some very recent "authority" which pronounces him wanting in imagination; or at the hasty
He has given us, for instance, no animal paintings or landscapes pure and simple, or, at least, none such have come down to us. And yet what gems of landscape he has touched into his backgrounds here and there! And what drawings of animal life he made! There are two, for instance, in the Basel Museum which could not be surpassed; studies in silver-point and water-colours of lambs and a bat outstretched. No reproduction could give the exquisite texture of the bat's wings, the wandering red veins, the almost diaphanous membrane, the furry body,—a miracle of patience and softness. It is all purest Nature. Like Topsy one can but "'spec' it growed" rather than was created.
And they are not only beautiful in themselves but full of living meanings. Many an hour the young painter enjoyed while he made such studies as his lambs on the pleasant slopes about Basel; the mountains scalloping the horizon, and all the sweet fresh winds vocal with tinkling bells or the chant of the deep-throated Rhine. Many of "the long, long thoughts" of youth,—those thoughts that ring like happy bells or sweep like rushing rivers,
In the next year after painting the portraits of Meyer and his wife there is a sudden break in the painter's story which has always puzzled his biographers. After such a brilliant start in Basel it is perplexing to find the young man, instead of proceeding to join the Painters' Guild and take the necessary citizenship, suddenly turn his back on all these encouragements and leave the town for a long absence and remote journeys. As will be seen when we come to consider the story of Holbein's married life, however, I have a theory that the influence which sent him south in such an unexpected fashion was apart from professional affairs.
Whether this is a good shot or no, certain it is that he did now go far south,—as distances were in those days; and that, paying his way as he went by his brush, he went first to Lucerne, where the evidence goes to show that he apparently thought of settling instead of at Basel,—and then on beyond it. And it seems highly probable that at this time he pushed on over the Alps and made his
Here he could not now, in 1517, have hoped to see either Bramante or Leonardo da Vinci in person. The former had died at Rome two years before; but, without getting even as far as Pavia, Milan could show some splendid monuments to his sojourn within her walls; characteristic examples of that architecture of the closing fifteenth century which Holbein loved as Bramante himself. Leonardo was now in France; but in the refectory of the Santa Maria Monastery was his immortal, though, alas! not imperishable, masterpiece—"The Last Supper." Time had not yet taught Leonardo, much less Holbein, the fleeting nature of mural oil-painting; the only so-called "fresco" painting which the latter ever attempted, so far as is known. But the great Supper was still glowing in all the splendour of its original painting, and would impress itself indelibly on an eye such as Holbein's. In more than one cathedral, too, as he wandered in such a holiday, he would have noted how Mantegna had made its architecture the background for his own individual genius.
At any rate each of these, somehow and somewhere, set its own seal upon the
And, in any event, on such a journey Lucerne must come first. And that he thought of making some long stay here when he returned is shown by his having joined in this year 1517, the Guild of St. Luke, the Painters' Guild of Lucerne, then but newly organised. "Master Hans Holbein has given one Gulden," reads the old entry. Two other items of this visit give us glimpses of its flesh-and-blood realities, perhaps of its unrest. The first, that he also joined a local company of Archers, the Militia of his day, seems to bring his living
And then he would appear to have shaken the dust, or more likely the snows, of Lucerne off his feet for the road to Italy, if not for Italy itself. Whatever his objective, he got, at any rate, well on toward the Pass of the St. Gothard. The scanty clues of such works as have remained on record prove that he reached Altdorf. But there the actual trail is altogether lost. If he spent the entire interval brush in hand, or if—as I believe—he treated himself to a bit of a holiday beyond the Alps, can be but a guess in the dark.
By this time the New Year of 1518, then falling in March, could not have been far off, before or behind him. And in 1518 Holbein executed the commission which must have been the envy of every local artist. Jacob von Hertenstein,
And a renowned triumph the painter made of it; a triumph such as, perhaps, no other artist north of Italy could then have equalled. It is idle now to dwell upon the religious subjects of one room, the genre paintings in another, the battle scenes of a third, and so on through those five famous rooms which were still in existence and fair preservation so late as 1824, but are now for ever lost; to say nothing of the painted Renaissance architecture and the historic legends which looked like solid realities when the faÇade was studied. But "Mizraim is become merchandise"; and all that is now left of what should have been a treasured and priceless heirloom is but a monument to the shame of that citizen, a banker, who could condemn such a thing to destruction as indifferently as if it had been a cowshed, and to the shame of the municipality which, at any cost, did not prevent it. Some hasty sketches—due to individual enterprise and a sense of the dignity of Holbein's fame—an original drawing for
HOLBEIN BASILIENSIS
1519-1526
| Holbein Basiliensis—Enters the Painters' Guild—Bonifacius Amerbach and his portrait—The Last Supper and its Judas—The so-called "Fountain of Life" at Lisbon—Genius for design and symbolism in architecture—Versatility, humour, fighting scenes—Holbein becomes a citizen and marries—Basel in 1519—Froben's circle—Tremendous events and issues of the time—Holbein's religious works—The Nativity and Adoration at Freiburg—Hans Oberriedt—The Basel Passion in eight panels—Passion Drawings—Christ in the tomb—Christ and Mary Magdalen at the door of the sepulchre—Rathaus wall-paintings—Birth of Holbein's eldest child—The Solothurn Madonna: its discovery and rescue—Holbein's wife and her portraits—Suggested solutions of some biographical enigmas—Title pages—Portraits of Erasmus—Journey to France, probably to Lyons and Avignon—Publishers and pictures of the so-called "Dance of Death"—Dorothea Offenburg as Venus and LaÏs Corinthiaca—Triumph of the Protestant party—Holbein decides to leave Basel for a time—The Meyer-Madonna of Darmstadt and Dresden, and its portraits. |
And now it is 1519, and with it the true Hour of Holbein's destiny is striking. Take away the coming seven years and you will still have what Holbein is too often
His Basel career may be said to begin here; his earlier work furnishing the Prologue. On the 25th September, 1519, when he was about two-and-twenty, he joined the Basel Guild of Painters; that same "Guild of Heaven" (Zunft zum Himmel) which his brother Ambrose had joined two years earlier and from which he seems to have passed to the veritable guild of Heaven at about this latter date.
And hardly is the ink dry upon the record of his membership than Holbein painted one of the most beautiful of his portraits—that of Bonifacius Amerbach (Plate 6). He stands beside a tree on which is hung an inscription. Behind him is Holbein's favourite early background,—the blue of the sky, here broken by the warm brown and green of the branch, and the faint glimpse of far-away mountains. Under his
Well may the inscription assert—above the signature, the name of the sitter and the date 14th October, 1519—
"Though but a painted face I am not far removed from Life; but rather,
By truthful lines, the noble image of my Possessor.
As he accomplishes eight times three years, so faithfully in me also
Is Nature's work proclaimed by the work of Art."
For here in truth is a work of Nature which is no less a work of Art.
This is the Amerbach who began and inspired his son Basilius (so named after Bonifacius's brother) to complete the Holbein Collection, which the Basel Museum bought long afterwards. And such was the love of both that they included, perhaps deliberately, much that has small probability of claim to be Holbein's work. They would reject nothing attributed to him; thinking a bushel of chaff
Bonifacius was the youngest of Johann Amerbach's three gifted sons. As all the world knows, Johann had been also a scholar as well as a printer, and great in both capacities. The most eminent scholars of his day gravitated as naturally to this noble personality as they afterwards did to that of his protÉgÉ and successor, Johann Froben. He had educated his sons, too, to worthily continue his life-work and maintain his devout principles. Bonifacius was the darling of more than one heart not given to softness. He had been more the friend than the pupil of Ulrich Zasius at the University of Freiburg, before he went to Avignon to complete his legal studies under Alciat. Five years after this portrait was painted he became Professor of Law in the Basel University. "I am ready to die," writes Erasmus of him, "when I shall have seen any
Very possibly it was for Bonifacius himself that Holbein painted his own portrait about this time (Plate 1, frontispiece). It is a worthy mate, at all events. In the Amerbach Catalogue it was simply called "Holbein's counterfeit, in dry colour" (ein conterfehung Holbein's mit trocken farben); the frame, too, was catalogued, though the painting was kept in a cabinet separately when the Basel Museum acquired it with the Collection.
The vigour and finish of this portrait on vellum, done in crayons or body-colour, make it a gem of the first water. The drawing was done in black chalk, and the tints have been rubbed in with coloured crayons or given with the point where lines of colour were required. The work has the delicacy of a water-colour and the strength of oils. The broad, soft, red hat, though so fine a bit of colour, is clearly worn as part of a simple everyday habit. There is no suggestion of studying for effect, or even caring at all about it. He wears his hat pulled soberly down over his brown hair exactly as when he wore it thus about the business of the day. The plastic modelling of the puckered brow and the mobile mouth is
Among the "early works" of the Amerbach Catalogue there is one which shows strong traces of Leonardo's and even more of Mantegna's influence on him at this time. It is a Last Supper, painted in oils on wood. But it was so mutilated in the iconoclastic fury of 1529, and has been so cobbled, re-broken, re-set, and "restored" generally, that it can no longer be called Holbein's work without many reservations. There is also another Last Supper, one of a coarsely painted set on canvas, which is attributed to him on much more doubtful grounds, to judge by the composition and colouring. Myself I should be inclined to see the inferior hand of Ambrose, Hans the elder, or perhaps even Sigmund Holbein in these, if they are genuine Holbein works at all.
But there are still to be seen the traces of his own hand and mind in the Last Supper in oils on wood. St. John's head must originally have been very beautiful; very manly, too,
By a very natural arrangement he is brought into the immediate foreground and sits there, already isolated, already damned, in such a torment of body and soul as haunts the spectator who has had the courage to reconsider the dictum of authorities who call him "a Jew of frightful vulgarity." Frightful he may be; but it is a strange judgment which can find him vulgar. Unfortunately, the painting is no longer in a condition to justify reproduction; but such as study this yellow-robed, emaciated, shivering, fever-consumed Judas will, I venture to assert, find food for thought in it even under all the injuries the work has undergone.
It is a demon-driven soul if ever there was one. He is in the very act of springing to his feet and rushing away anywhere, anywhere out of this Presence;—no more concerned about his money-bag than about the food he loathes. Thirty pieces of silver! If the priests have
There is another and a very different work, an oil painting, in the Royal Collection at Lisbon, signed IOANNES HOLBEIN FECIT 1519, which, if
The majority of those competent to form a judgment in such matters are inclined to attribute the work to Hans Holbein the Elder, who did not die until some years later, and who made use of a very similar form of signature. And for myself I find it hard to see how anyone familiar with Hans the Younger could accept it as his work at any period of his career; least
Considerably before 1519, as has been said, Holbein had begun to develop his special genius for Design, and to apply it to glass or window-paintings, as well as to metal and wood-engravings. The beautiful drawings, whether washed, or etched with the point, in chalks or Indian ink, of which examples may be seen in almost every great collection, private as well as public, that year after year were created by that fertile brain and ever more masterly hand, constitute an Art in themselves. And since so many (perhaps the greater number as well as the greater in subject) of his paintings have perished, it is chiefly in his drawings that the progression of
His architectural settings, too, tended to greater simplicity in his later years. Yet this is not a safe guide. Some early designs have simple forms; some comparatively late ones, a very ornate architecture. For the truth is that these architectural backgrounds and settings remained, so long as his fancy had any free field for disporting itself, an integral part of his conception. But only as inseparable
His stately pillars and arches, his fluid forms of ornament, are not his idea of the actual surroundings of the characters he portrays, any more than they are your idea, or mine, of those surroundings. Is it to be supposed that he thought the dwellings of our Lord were palaces? Or that he could not paint a stable? Those who maintain that Holbein was a Realist in the modern sense of the word must reconcile as best they can the theory with the facts. But when we see the stage set with every stately circumstance,—the Babe amid the fading splendours of earthly palaces, our Lord mocked by matter as well as man,—I dare to think that we shall do well to cease from insisting on an adobe wall, and to study those "incongruous" circumstances to which the will and not the poverty of Holbein consents. We shall, at least, no longer be dull to "the tears of things" as he saw them.
But it would be no less a mistake to think of Holbein as one without a sense of laughter as well. His drawings of open-mouthed peasants gossiping in a summer's nooning, or
He was particularly happy, also, in his drawings of the Landsknechte, those famous Mercenaries of "Blut und Eisen"; always ready to drink a good glass, and a-many; to love a good lass after the same liberal fashion; to troll a good song or fight a good fight; and all with equal zest. He had not mixed with these masterful gentry for nothing; nor they with him to wholly die. There are a number of drawings where they are engaged in combat, too, which show that Holbein's heart leapt to the music of sword and spear as blithely as does Scott's or Dumas's—as blithely as did the hearts of the ReislÄufer themselves. Look at the mad rush, the hand-to-hand grapple, in a drawing of the Basel Collection, for instance
On the 3rd of July, 1520, Holbein fulfilled what was then the requirement of almost every guild, and purchased his citizenship; a citizenship to reflect unfading honour on Basel, and of which she has ever been justly proud. And somewhere about the same time he married Elsbeth Schmidt, a tanner's widow, who had one child, Franz.
For the past four or five years Basel had been steadily becoming more and more democratic. And at a period when its Élite were scholars and printers and civic officials of every origin,—when the illegitimate son of a Rotterdam
If there was an emblem peculiarly abhorrent to the Basilisk (the Device of Basel) it was the Crescent-and-star. But nothing could better serve to recall the rough outline of Basel in Holbein's day than this very emblem. As the Rhine suddenly swerves from its first wild rush westward and races away, northerly, to the German Ocean, it shapes the hollow of the crescent in which Little-Basel (Klein-Basel)
Great-Basel's northern face was protected by the Rhine, while the stout city wall secured its convex curve. Of this wall the eastern horn was St. Alban's Gate; its north-west was St. John's Gate (St. Johann Thor); beside which stood the decaying Commandery of the Knights of Malta, which had contributed a large sum toward the expanded wall, in order to be included within it. And just as these spots still mark the horns of the old crescent, the Spalen Thor shows where it had its greatest depth, midway between the other two.
A straight line running due north-east from this Spalen-Thor would cross the big square of the Fish-market (Fischmarktplatz) pretty nearly as the uncovered stream of the Birsig, or "Little Birs," did before the quaint little bridge, which then united the two halves of the Fischmarkt, was absorbed in the paving over of stream and square before Holbein's day. This same straight line would of itself draw
Bonifacius Amerbach's home, the "Emperor's Seat" (Kaiserstuhl, now 23, Rheingasse), was in Klein-Basel. Johann Amerbach had bought it, near to his beloved friends, the Carthusians. In 1520 the good old man had slept for six years in the cloisters of the monastery; where to-day the children of the Orphan Asylum play above his grave.
But all the conditions of Holbein's daily life would lead him to prefer Basel proper, and to choose the quarter in which he bought a home
As early as 1517 the Fishers' Company had extended itself so greatly as to become a notable institution of the Vorstadt, including many members from Klein-Basel also; while its military record was a proud one. But it was in this year, while Holbein was making his visit to Lucerne and beyond, that this guild took the more truly descriptive name which it bears to this day, that of the "Vorstadt
Every day would take him to the Fischmarkt,—the great square humming with activity, crowded with inns, public-houses, shops, booths, dwelling-houses,—the trade mart of every nationality. The Cornmarkt near by, now the Marktplatz, with its almost finished Rathaus, was the centre of official civic life. When the great bell clanged on the Rathaus, and its flag was flung out, not only every professional soldier, but every guild and every male above fourteen, knew his appointed place at the wall, and took it. But every day, and all day, the Fischmarkt flung out its peaceful standards, or rallied men to this side or to that with the tocsin of its presses,—the old Amerbach printing-house "of the Settle" (zum Sessel), which was Johann Froben's home and printing-house in 1520.
Morning after morning, and year upon year, Holbein turned his back upon St. Johannthor, and walked eastward along the Rheinhalde;—the river racing toward him on his left hand, the University rising in front of him beyond the bridge, and the delicate Cathedral towers
But he would pass another spot—one day to be of far more living importance to him. In 1520 it was a corn warehouse, known by the name of ze CrÜz, which belonged to Adam Petri, the printer, who had inherited it from his uncle, the famous printer Johann Petri, by whose ingenious improvements the art of printing was so greatly facilitated. Two years later, in 1522, Froben bought this granary, ze CrÜz, and converted it into the book-magazine which was known all over Europe as "Froben's Book-house." And in this latter year Adam Petri, greatly to Luther's disgust, pirated Luther's translation of the New Testament, which had appeared three months before.
Holbein's only rival, if he could be called such, in work of this sort was the talented goldsmith, Urs Graf, who, as an exceedingly loose fish, lived most appropriately in the Fischmarkt in his own house near the old Birsig Bridge, when he was not in the lock-up for one or another of his constant brawls and scandals. But to compare the best work of both is to recognise a difference in kind as well as degree: the essential difference between even negligent genius and the most elaborate talent. High talent Urs Graf had unquestionably; though stamped,—I think,—with the lawless caprices of his own
Many a time, too, just where he would turn away from the Rhine for the business centre of Gross-Basel, the artist would make some little pause at the old "Flower" Inn (zur Blume), which gave its name to the Blumenplatz, and is still commemorated in the greatly extended Blumenrain of to-day. All the world now knows the famous hotel of "The Three Kings"; and where it reaches nearest to the Old Bridge stood the "Blume" of Holbein's time, even then the oldest of the Basel inns. This Blume, not to be confused with later inns of the same name, shared with its no less famous contemporary,—"The Stork," in the Fischmarkt,—the special patronage of the chief printers. Basilius Amerbach, for instance, the brother of Holbein's friend Bonifacius, lived at the Blume; and often the painter must have turned in for a friendly glass with him and a chat about Bonifacius, away at his law studies in Avignon.
As for the Stork, its very rooms were named in remembrance of the envoys and merchant traders who flocked to it on all great occasions. There was a "Cologne Room," for instance,
But in 1520, when Holbein was just married,
And what discussions those were that drew each man to give of his best in the common talk! Venice sent news of the "unspeakable" Turk, whom she had such good cause to watch and dread. For fifty years his name had ceased to blanch the cheek of other nations; but now it was said, and said truly, that the dying Selim, "the Grim," had forged a thunderbolt which Suleyman II. would not be slow to hurl. No man could know the worst or dared predict the end, as to that Yellow Terror of Holbein's time. And closer still, to keen eyes, were the threats of the coming Peasant Terror. Wurtemberg
The death of Maximilian and the election of Charles V. were a year old now. But none knew better than the Basel printers how much the League of Swabia and the Swiss Confederation had weighed in the close contest of claims between those three strangely youthful competitors for the Emperor's crown;—Charles, but nineteen; Francis I., one-and-twenty; and Henry VIII., not twenty-five. Basel also knew that Charles had only bought his triumph by swearing to summon the Diet of Worms. All the more, therefore, was she intensely alive to the possible issues of the Arabian-Nights-Entertainment which had but just concluded on the dreary Calais flats when Holbein became one of Basel's citizens. Erasmus had come back full of it. Marco Polo's best wonders made but a dingy show beside the "Field of the Cloth of Gold," where in this June the two defeated candidates for imperial honours had kissed each other midway between the ruined moat of Guisnes and the rased battlements of Arde.
Then, on top of this, came the rumours of the
Among the five lost works which Patin says Holbein painted, there was a "Nativity" and an "Adoration of the Kings." It is impossible now to say what resemblances, if any, existed between these and the same subjects, executed not much later, which are now in the University Chapel, Freiburg Minster. These latter are the only known works of Holbein that still hang in a sacred edifice. They were evidently designed to fold in upon a central altar-piece with an arched top, thus making, when open, the usual triptych; but the central painting has vanished. This large work was a gift to the Carthusian monastery in Klein-Basel;
In both wings what I can only describe as the atmosphere of Infancy,—and a touching atmosphere it is too—is strengthened by keeping all the figures small and heightening this suggestion by contrast with a grandiose architecture. In both, too, the sacred scenes reveal themselves like visions unseen by the Oberriedt family, who face outward toward the altar and are supposed to be lighted by the actual lights of the church. The whole work must once have been a glorious creation, with its rich colours, its beautiful architectural forms, and its mingling of purest imagination with realism. What would one not give to see the lost work these wings covered?
In the left wing, the Nativity (Plate 8), Holbein has remarkably anticipated the lighting of Correggio's famous masterpiece, not finished until years after this must have been painted, by the conditions of Oberriedt's history and Basel's as well. The Light that is to light the world lights up the scene with an exquisite enchanting
The same union of unfettered fancy symbolism and realism displays itself throughout the right wing,—where the Virgin is enthroned in front of crumbling palaces. The sun's rays form a great star, of such dazzling light that one of the attendants shades his eyes to look upward, and an old man with a noble head,
To carp at such conceptions because their architecture is as imaginative and as deeply symbolical as the action, is to demand that Holbein shall be someone else. These pictures, beyond the portraits below them, are the farthest possible from aiming at what we demand of Realism, though their own realism is astonishing. Holbein all too seldom sounds them, but when he does choose to stir only a joyous elation in the heart he rings a peal of silver bells. Here all is glad thanksgiving. The Divine has come into a sick and sorry world; and, behold, all is changed! Nothing sordid, nothing shabby, consists with the meaning of this miracle. Therefore it is not here. All is transformed; all is a New Jerusalem—splendour, peace, ineffable and mysterious Beauty.
With the dominance of the anti-Catholic party, which unseated Meyer zum Hasen in
Another great religious picture, once no less renowned than Oberriedt's altar-paintings, has suffered a worse fate. This is the eight-panelled altar-piece of the Passion, now in the Basel Museum (Plate 9). So far back as is known it was preserved, probably after being hidden from the fury that attacked all church pictures, in the Rathaus. Maximilian I., of Bavaria, the zealous collector of DÜrer's works, offered almost any price for this altar-piece
| Gethsemane | Kiss_of_Judas |
| Gethsemane Click to ENLARGE | The Kiss of Judas Click to ENLARGE |
| Before_Pontius_Pilate | The_Scourging |
| Before Pontius Pilate Click to ENLARGE | The Scourging Click to ENLARGE |
| The_Mocking | The_Way_to_Calvary |
| The Mocking Click to ENLARGE | The Way to Calvary Click to ENLARGE |
| It_is_finished | The_Entombment |
| "It is finished" Click to ENLARGE | The Entombment Click to ENLARGE |
| THE PASSION Eight-panelled Altar-piece. Oils. Basel Museum.) | |
Alas! this laurel, too, has been filched from Holbein's fame. In 1771 the altar-piece was consigned to the collection where it now is; and it was then decided to gild the gold and paint the lily. The work was subjected to one of those crude "restorations" which respect nothing save the frame. And no monarch will ever again compete for its possession. Red is over red and blue over blue, doubtless; but in place of Holbein's rich harmony a jangle of gaudy conflicting colours now sets one's teeth on edge. So that only in a photograph can one even enjoy the composition—all that is left of the Master.
The Basel Museum possesses also a set of ten washed drawings in Indian ink,—scenes of the Passion designed for glass-painting,—which must be conned and conned again before one can "know" Holbein at all in his deepest moods. They are a great Testament, though they seem unbearably harsh at a superficial glance. But put aside your own ideas and humbly study the ideas of Holbein,—sure that they must be well worth the reverence of yours or mine,—and little by little you will be made free of that Underworld where Holbein's true self has its home; you will pierce its gloom and find its clue and understand its tongue. It is a small matter whether you and I find ourselves in sympathy with that world, or
Without mastering the logical sequence of these ten drawings,—where scene by scene the Divine recedes before our eyes, and the Son of Man assumes more and more the whole burden of Sin and Death,—it is inevitable that the life-size painting of Christ in the Grave, also in the Basel Museum (Plate 10), should seem just a ghastly and "unpardonable" piece of realism. Realism of the most ghastly truthfulness, as to a corpse in the grave, it certainly is. But although it may be questioned whether such a picture should ever be painted, no one who looks through the form to the thought that shapes it would pronounce even this awful utterance "unpardonable."
There have been those who could see in this dead Christ,—lying rigid in a green sarcophagus that throws over the waxen flesh the ghastly threat of that decay which would follow if no miracle intervened,—there have been those, I say, who could see in it only superb technique. And others see only the negation of all idealism, if not of all faith.
Here He lies that surrendered Himself to the punishment of Sin and the penalty of Death—for all men and all time. His pale lips are set with the superhuman agony of the cry with which He paid the uttermost farthing of that bond. Man has died for man, martyrs for faith; here God has died unto Himself, for us. There has been no playing at death. All the pitiless terrors of the grave are here, with Him who for love of us has chosen to know Mortality "like at all points" with mortal men. What He bore for us, shall we shrink from so much as realising? The great eyes are fixed in a look whose penetrating, almost liquid sweetness not even the rigor of the final anguish could obliterate. Divine devotion,—devotion more than mortal,—still lingers in those sockets. The heart may well dilate before this sight; the soul fall on its knees. By each of those bloodstained steps, by the sting of this death, we have been paid for. Here, here only,—as Holbein saw it,—is the leverage the heathen
This is anything but a theological tangent. A great artist has bequeathed us his beliefs,—drawn and painted in many works, with every patient, virile, expressive power at his command. There has been enough and to spare of shrieks or scoffs. A little humility and a little study is in place, too. For the rest, let us not forget that this large painting was made for some altar; and that many a weeping penitent, many a devout heart, has been pierced with its message. On the edge of the stone coffin, which is tinted a warm green within, and lit by some opening at the foot, is the inscription in gold letters: "Jesus Nazarenus Rex JudÆorum." The stigmata are painted with unsparing truth. The work is dated 1521.
There is in the Hampton Court Gallery a little painting which has only comparatively recently been recognised as Holbein's, but which forms the beautiful and fitting close of this set of religious pictures. As is the case with so many of his works, the critics are not unanimous upon it. But the authorities who have no doubts as to its being a genuine Holbein of this period are so weighty that
In the Hampton Court Catalogue it is styled "Mary Magdalen at our Lord's Sepulchre," but I prefer to call it the Risen Christ (Plate 11). It must once have been supremely beautiful; for even now its ideal loveliness shines through all the evil fortunes which have once again defaced the handiwork of Holbein. The type of Christ, and indeed the work throughout, bears a marked resemblance to the eight-panelled Basel altar-piece.
The painter has chosen the moment recorded in the twentieth chapter of St. John. In that early dawn, "when it was yet dark," Mary has brought spikenard in a marble cup, if not to anoint the sacred Dead at least to pour it on the threshold of the sealed tomb, with tears and prayers. She has fled to tell St. John and St. Peter of the sacrilege of the open tomb,—has followed them back, still mechanically clasping her useless spikenard,—has seen them go in where her trembling knees refused to follow, and then go homeward, as we can see them in the distance, arguing the almost incredible fact.
Poor Mary has had no heart for discussion. She has stayed weeping by the empty grave
It is this tremendous moment that Holbein has seized. And with what exquisite feeling for every detail of the scene, every great emotion! Had the painting been preserved, as it deserved to be, surely it too could claim a part of that laurel wreath which Sandrart averred could not be torn from the Basel altar-piece by any rival, whether Italian or German.
The misty landscape, with the crosses of Golgotha and the eastern hills catching the first brightness of the new Day dawning over mortality; the broken clouds of night, scattered like the conquered horrors of the grave, and the illuminated tomb where Hope and Faith henceforth ask us why we weep; the hurrying agitation of St. Peter and the trusting serenity of St. John, expressed in every gesture; the dusky trees; Mary's quivering doubt and
What forbidding tenderness in that Face lighted by the grave He has passed through! What a subtle yet eloquent suggestion of the eternal difference, henceforth, between Love and love is in these mortal lineaments that have evermore resumed their divinity! No face, no type, no art, can ever realise Christ; yet when this little painting was first added to the great roll of Holbein Basiliensis, it must have gone as near to realising its subject as the colours of earth can go.
But every man, happily for himself, has a material as well as an immaterial world with which he must be concerned. To transpose Bagehot's profound little saying,—Each man dines in a room apart, but we all go down to dinner together. And though Holbein knew the pinch of narrow means, he had no lack of good cheer as well as austere food in his art.
On March 12th, 1521, the Great Council held its first meeting in the new Rathaus; and Meyer zum Hasen, who presided over it as Burgomaster, entrusted to his protÉgÉ the enviable task of decorating the Council Chamber. Fifty-six
In all, there would seem to have been six large pictures or set pieces; but two were not done until years later. One wall being too broken up by windows to be suitable, there remained three,—of which "the back wall" adjoining Meyer's house was not touched at this time. Ostensibly the reason was want of funds; but as a matter of fact the Protestant party (to anticipate this name), which grew strong enough to unseat Meyer before the year was out, was at this time indifferent to art when not positively inimical to it.
Whether treating a faÇade or an interior it was Holbein's custom to make a flat wall-space assume the most solid-looking forms of Renaissance architecture. Iselin once said of a faÇade of Holbein's, that there was a dog painted on it so naturally that the dogs in the street would run up and bark at it. And so astounding was the realism with which he threw out balconies, and added windows, cornices, and statues, and the richest carvings, pillars, arches, and vistas
Inside would be kindred illusions. Large pictures would seem to be actually taking place without, and beheld through beautifully carved archways or windows; while the apparent walls would have niches filled with superb marble statues and the ceiling be supported by pillars, behind which people walked and talked or leaned out to watch the chief scenes.
And so it was with the Council Chamber. But nothing now remains of these works except fragments and a few drawings for the principal features. So far as can be judged, each wall had two large scenes; the four pictures of this period being chosen from the heroic legends of the Gesta Romanorum; the two painted later, from the Old Testament.
But while these large works were going forward Holbein was busy with many others; private commissions for Froben, occasionally
In 1522 occurred two important events in his life. His first child, the son he called Philip, was born; and he painted an altar-piece which is in some respects the most beautiful of his extant works. The latter—now in the Solothurn Museum, and therefore called the "Solothurn Madonna" (Plate 12)—has had one of the most extraordinary histories to be found in the records of art.
The background of this picture,—a massive arch of grey sandstone supported by iron stanchions,—was evidently designed to suit the surrounding architecture of some grey-walled ancient structure. On a daÏs covered with a green carpet, patterned in white and red and emblazoned with the arms of the donor and his wife, sits the lovely Madonna with the Child held freely yet firmly in two of the most exquisite hands which even Holbein ever painted. Her
The Child is drawn and painted superbly. The carnations are exquisite; the gravity of infancy is not exaggerated, yet fittingly enforces the gesture of benediction. The left hand is turned outward in a movement so peculiar to happy, vigorous babyhood that it is a marvel of observation and nature. The little foot is admirably foreshortened, and the wrinkled sole a bit of inimitable painting. But perhaps most wonderful of all is the art with which, amid so many splendid details, the Child is the centre of interest as well as of the picture. How it is so, is Holbein's own secret.
To right and left of the Virgin stand two fine types of spiritual and temporal authority. Behind and at her right, almost hidden by the amplitude of her mantle, kneels a poor wretch
Opposite to him stands the patron-saint of Solothurn,—St. Ursus, a hero of the Theban legend,—dressed from head to foot in a suit of magnificently painted armour. His left hand grasps his sword-hilt; his right supports the great red flag with its white cross. Nor is that flag of the year 1522 the least interesting detail of this work. With the crimson reflections of the flag streaking the cold gleams of his
This work was commissioned by Hans Gerster, for many years Town Archivist of Basel, in which capacity he had to convey important state papers to other councils with which that of Basel had negotiations. From this it came about that from the year when Basel entered the Swiss Confederation, in 1501, Gerster was almost as much at home in the "City of Ambassadors" as in his own, and the Dean or Probst of the Solothurn Cathedral—the "Cathedral of St. Ursus and St. Victor"—became not only his spiritual director, but one of his most intimate friends. Many circumstances which cannot be given here make it pretty evident that in 1522 Gerster, probably under the advice of the Probst, the Coadjutor Nicholas von Diesbach, made this picture an expiatory offering for some secret sin of grave proportions. There are hints that point to treachery to the Basel troops, in the Imperial interests, sympathy with which finally cost him, as well as his friend Meyer zum Hasen, his
Be this as it may, it is apparently in direct connection with this confessed sin that "the sinner's saint," St. Martin of Tours, is chosen as Intercessor for Gerster, wearing the prescribed chasuble for this office. And it seems likely that the addition to his mitre of the figure of St. Nicholas was Gerster's wish, in order to specially associate the name-saint of his friend—Nicholas von Diesbach—with this intercession. It is assumed by those who have patiently unearthed these details of circumstantial evidence, that the beggar is introduced to mark the identity of the boundlessly charitable Bishop of Tours. But I venture to suggest still another reason: this is, that in the uplifted, pleading face of the mendicant, whose expression of appeal and humility is a striking bit of realism in these ideal surroundings, we may have the actual portrait of the donor, Hans
It is, as has been said, a marvellous story by which this glorious painting,—in which the introduction of the patron-saint of Solothurn proves that it was created for one of her own altars,—was completely lost to her, and to the very histories of Art, and then returned to the city for which it was originally destined; all by a chain of seemingly unrelated accidents. But only the skeleton of that story can be given here.4
In all probability this Madonna was executed for the altar of the ancient Lady Chapel of the Solothurn Cathedral. A hundred and twenty-six years after it was painted, this chapel was pulled down, to be replaced by a totally different style of architecture; and as the picture was then smoke-stained and "old-fashioned" it would in all likelihood drop into some lumber-room. At all events, it must have become the property of the Cathedral choirmaster,—one Hartmann,
Facilis descensus! Another turn of the centuries' wheel and the gift of this chapel's founder was once again thought unworthy of the altar to which it had been presented. When Herr Zetter of Solothurn first saw it in the queer little Allerheiligen chapel, it hung high up on the choir wall; blackened, worm-eaten, without a frame, suspended by a string passed through two holes which had been bored through the painted panel itself. Yet his acute eye was greatly interested by it. And when, during an official visit in 1864, he heard that the chapel was undergoing a drastic renovation, he was concerned for the fate of the discoloured old painting. At first it could not be discovered at all. Finally he found it, face downward, spotted all over with whitewash, under the rough boards that served for the workmen's platform. A few hours later and it, too, would have been irrevocably gone; carted away with the "old rubbish"!
He examined it, made out the signature, knew that this might mean either any one of
To-day this work, which some forty years ago no one dreamed had ever existed, smiles in all the beauty of its first painting; a monument to the insight and generous enthusiasm of the gentleman whose name is rightly connected with its own in its official title—"The Zetter-Madonna of Solothurn." And it smiles with Holbein's own undebased handiwork throughout. Pace Woltmann's blunder,—its network of fine cracks, even over the Virgin's face, attests that it has suffered no over-painting.
This work, too, is the most precious of all that have come down to us of Holbein's imaginative compositions, from the fact that his first-born, Philip, who was born about 1522, was the model for the Child, and that a portrait of Elsbeth, his wife, served as a study for the Virgin. This portrait is an unnamed and unsigned drawing in silver-point and Indian ink, heightened with touches of red chalk, now in the Louvre Collection. (Plate 13.)
| PLATE_13 |
| PLATE 13. UNNAMED PORTRAIT-STUDY: NOT CATALOGUED AS HOLBEIN'S Silver-point and Indian-ink. Louvre Collection Believed by the writer to be Holbein's drawing of his wife before her first marriage, and the model for the Solothurn Madonna Click to ENLARGE |
That this is a portrait of Holbein's wife any careful comparison with her portrait at Basel must establish. Feature for feature, allowing for the changes of sufficient years, the two faces are one and the same. The very line of the shoulder, setting of the head, and even the outline of the fashion in which the low dress is cut, is alike in both. And equally unmistakable
Yet I am unable to accept Woltmann's theory that the drawing was made in 1522 "for" the Virgin. He assumes that the lettering which borders the bodice in this drawing—ALS. IN. ERN. ALS. IN....—and the braids in which the hair is worn are simply some "fancy" dress. But surely if ever hair bore the stamp of unstudied, even ugly custom, it does so here. Then, too, Woltmann himself, as are all who adopt this explanation, is unable to reconcile the oldest age which can be assigned to this sitter with the youngest that can be assumed for the Basel painting of 1529 upon a hypothesis of only seven years' interval. Temperament and trouble can do much in seven years; but not so much as this. I say temperament advisedly; because all the evidence of Holbein's life substantiates the assertion of Van Mander, who had it from Holbein's own circle of contemporaries,—that the painter's life was made wretched by her violent temper. We shall find him far from blameless in later years; but though it may not excuse him, his unhappy home must largely explain his alienation.
Yet that it can explain such an alteration
Myself, I must believe, then, that this portrait was made years before 1522; probably in the young painter's first months in Basel, in 1515; and thus some fourteen years before the Basel group of 1529 was painted. It may well have been that some serious misunderstanding between them was at the bottom of that otherwise inexplicable departure in 1517, and the two years' absence in Lucerne and still more southern cities. Of course this is mere guesswork; so is every hypothesis until it is proved. But all the simple commonplaces of first love, estrangement, separation, and a renewed betrothal after Elsbeth's early widowhood with one child, could easily have run a natural course between 1515 and their marriage, somewhere about 1520.
As for the inscription,—it is a detail that Woltmann thinks represents a repetition of
Thus for the altar-piece of 1522 there would be this portrait of Elsbeth in her girlhood ready to his hand. But even so, see how he has idealised it, made a new creature of it, all compact of exquisite ideals! He has eliminated the subtle sensuousness which has its own allure in the drawing. Every trait is refined, purified, vivified, raised to another plane of character. Genius has put the inferior elements into its retort, and transmuted them to some heavenly metal far enough from Holbein's home-life.
Throughout all these years, as has been said, he was busy for the printers also. In
He had painted, besides portraits of Froben and others, at least three portraits of Erasmus by 1524. For in June of this year the latter writes to his friend Pirkheimer, at NÜrnberg, to say that he has sent two of these portraits by the "most accomplished painter" to England; while the artist himself, he adds, has conveyed still a third to France.
The smaller of the two sent to England, two-thirds the size of life, is probably the one now in the Louvre (Plate 14). It is a masterpiece of penetration and technique. Erasmus is here seen in the most unaffected simplicity of dress and pose; in profile against a dark-green
The portrait now in the Basel Museum, in oils on paper, afterwards fastened to the panel, is in all likelihood that third portrait which Erasmus told Pirkheimer the painter himself had taken to France. So that Holbein must have painted it for, and carried it to, Bonifacius Amerbach, who was then, in 1524, finishing a renewed course of study at Avignon. Probably it was during this visit to France, too, that he made the spirited sketches of monuments at Bourges. In that case it would seem that he struck across by way of Dijon to the Cathedral City, in connection with some matter not now to be discovered, and from there took the great highway to Avignon by way of Lyons; carrying with him the gift of his sketches from the monuments of Duke Jehan of Berri and his wife.
Whatever the reason that sent him abroad on this journey,—whether unhappiness at home or the troubled state of public affairs during the Peasants' War of 1524 and 1525,—or whether he simply had business in France which delayed him there for a year or two—at all events, all records fail as to his wanderings or work in this long interval. And many circumstances go to show that it was at this time that he entered upon the immortal work which was published at Lyons, by the Trechsel Brothers, many years later;—those "Images of Death" which have borrowed the old name in popular parlance, and are generally called Holbein's "Dance" of Death.
Just why the Trechsels did not issue the publication until 1538 it is impossible to say. As one of the largest Catholic publishing-houses of France, they would be governed by circumstances entirely outside of Holbein's history or control. But more than one circumstance presses the conclusion that the designs were made between 1523 and 1526. And there is a certain amount of evidence for the belief that they may have been first struck off in Germany, possibly by some one of the multifarious
All the world knows these wonderful designs; their beauty of line, power of expression, and sparkling fancy. Among them all there are only two where Death is a figure of violence; and but one,—the knight, transfixed by one fell, malignant stroke from behind—where Death exhibits positive ferocity. In both of these,—the Count, beaten down by his own great coat-of-arms, is the other,—it is easy to read a reflection of the actualities of the Peasants' War then raging.
For the rest, the grim skeleton wears no unkind smile; though that he is Death makes it look a ghastly-enough pleasantry. But toward the poor and the aged he is better than merry; he is kind. His fleshless hand is raised in benediction over the aged woman; and the bent patriarch leans on his arm, listening to Death's attendant playing the sweet old melodies of Long-Ago as he stands on the verge of the great Silence.
But where a selection must be made, there are two drawings with their own special claim to consideration. These are the Ploughman and the Priest (Plate 15). The
| PLATE_15a | PLATE_15b |
| PLATE 15a. THE PLOUGHMAN "Images of Death" Woodcut series Click to ENLARGE | PLATE 15b. THE PRIEST "Images of Death" Woodcut series Click to ENLARGE |
The second selection, the Priest, is its own proof, if any were needed, of how sharply Holbein distinguished cloth from cloth. In it, nearly a decade after he had pointed Erasmus's satire on the unworthy prelate or the unclean friar, may plainly be read that reverence for the true priest which Holbein shared with all his best friends. In the quaint, quiet street this solemn procession is too familiar a sight to draw any spectator from the hearth where the fire of the Living is blazing so cheerily. The good Father, very lovingly drawn, casts his kind glance around as he passes on his Office with the veiled Pyx carried reverently. Before him goes Death, his Server, hastening the last mercy with eager steps. Under his arm is the tiny glass that has measured the whole of a mortality; the sands have lost their
Holbein must have had his own solemn memories of the Last Office as he drew this picture of the good parish priest. For it was just about this time that the Viaticum must have been administered to his father. In 1526 the then Burgomaster of Basel wrote to the monastery at Issenheim, where Hans Holbein the Elder had left his painting implements behind him years before, in which he recalls to the Fathers how vainly and how often "our citizen," Hans the Younger, had applied to get these costly materials restored to their owner during his life; or to himself as his father's heir afterwards. This application was no more successful than Holbein's own, apparently; and the painter was told to seek his father's gold and pigments among the peasants who had pillaged the monastery.
By 1526 Holbein was back in Basel; but two works of this year would go to show that he
This was a lady whose past career might have warned a lover that whatever she might prove as a goddess, she could play but a fallen angel's part. The annals of Basel knew her only too well. This was Dorothea, the daughter of a knight of good old lineage,—Hans von Offenburg. But the knight died while she was quite young, and her mother, better famed for looks than conduct, married the girl to a debauched young aristocrat,—Joachim von Sultz. His own record is hardly
Unhappy Holbein, indeed! The temper of Xantippe herself, if she be but the decent mother of one's children, might work less havoc with a life than this embroidered cestus. But "the German Apelles" was no Greek voluptuary, ambitious in heathen vices, such as that other Apelles whose painting of Venus was said to be his masterpiece. And when Holbein inscribed his second portrait of Dorothea with the words LaÏs Corinthiaca, the midsummer madness must have been already a matter of scorn and wonder to himself. His whole life and the works of his life are the negation of the groves of Corinth.
The paint was not long dry on the Goddess of Love—at any rate, her dress was not worn out—before he had seen her in her true colours; "the daughter of the horse-leech, crying Give, Give."
And so he painted her in 1526 (Plate 17); to scourge himself, surely, since she was too notoriously infamous to be affected by it. As if in stern scorn of every beauty, every allure,
Small wonder that an artist such as Holbein should feel his heart grow sick within him, and should turn his thoughts with increasing determination to some fresh field. Even without the bitterness that now must have edged the tongue of a wronged wife, or the bitterer taste of Dead Sea fruit in his own mouth,—he must have been driven to try his luck elsewhere. And of all the invitations urged upon him, the chances which Erasmus's introductions could give him in England would probably offer the greatest promise.
But before he set out with these letters, in the late summer of 1526, he executed yet one more great commission for his old friend, Jacob Meyer zum Hasen, now leader of the Catholic
Unquestionably the painting now in the Schloss at Darmstadt is the earlier version. And unquestionably, too, the changes introduced in the Dresden copy,—the elevated architecture, slenderer figures, and less happy Child,—are so great as to lend weight to the arguments of those who still claim that no copyist would ever have made them. But, as has been said, the contention that the Dresden work is a replica by Holbein of the older Darmstadt altar-piece, is now maintained by only a very small minority of judges. The painting of the Darmstadt work is admitted by all to be more uniformly
| PLATE_19 |
| PLATE 19. THE MEYER-MADONNA [Later Version. Held by many to be a copy] Oils. Dresden Gallery Click to ENLARGE |
In the Darmstadt work the Virgin's dress is wholly different in tone from her robe at Dresden; otherwise the colouring aims to be the same in each. Here, in the original altar-piece, it is a greenish-blue. The lower sleeves are golden, a line of white at the wrist, and a filmier one within the bodice. Her girdle is a rich red; her mantle a greenish-grey. Over this latter her fair hair streams like softest sunshine. Above her noble, pity-full face sits her crown of fine gold and pearls.
The woman kneeling nearest to the Madonna is commonly believed to be Meyer's first wife, who had died in 1511, the mother of one child—a daughter—by a previous husband. Between this stepdaughter and Meyer there was considerable litigation over her property. The younger woman, whose chin-cloth is dropped in the painting though worn like the others in the drawing for her portrait, is Meyer's second wife, Dorothea Kannegiesser, whom he married about 1512, and with whom he was painted by
In the drawing for the young girl, Anna Meyer, who kneels beside her mother with a red rosary in her hands, she has her golden-brown hair hanging loose down her back, as befits a girl of thirteen. But in the painting it is coiled in glossy braids beneath some ceremonial head-dress; this is richly embroidered with pearls, with red silk tassel and a wreath of red and white flowers above it. This head-dress is painted with much more beautiful precision in the older work, and the expression of the girl's face is much more deeply devout; her hands, too, are decidedly superior to those of the Dresden work.
This is true also of the carpet, patterned in red and green, with touches of white and black, on a ground of deep yellow. The Dresden carpet is conspicuously inferior in finish and colour to that of Darmstadt, so much so that Waagen and others, who believe the former a replica, think a pupil or assistant may have been responsible for this and other
The elder boy, with the tumbled brown hair, dressed in a light-brown coat trimmed with red-brown velvet, and hose of cinnabar-red, with decorations of gold clasps and tags on fine blue cords, has a yellowish-green portemonnaie, with tassels of dull blue hanging from his girdle. All the carnations are superb, and in the Darmstadt picture the infant Christ wears a sweet and happy smile. In that of Dresden He looks sad and ill; a fact which has given rise to the theory Ruskin adopted—that the Virgin had put down the divine Child and taken up Meyer's ailing one. But the absence of wonder on the faces of Meyer's family, and, indeed, the familiar affection of the elder boy, would of itself negative this theory. I have my own ideas as to this point, but it would serve no useful purpose to go into them in this place. Of these two sons of Meyer there is no other record. Anna alone survived her mother, who married again after Meyer's death. Anna's daughter married Burgomaster Remigius FÄsch, or Fesch, whose grandson—Remigius FÄsch, counsellor-at-law—was the well-known art collector whose collection and manuscript are also in the Basel Museum,
Even the cool eye of Walpole was warmed by this great work of 1526, as he saw it in the Dresden painting then hanging in the Palazzo Delfino at Venice. "For the colouring," he exclaims, "it is beautiful beyond description; and the carnations have that enamelled bloom so peculiar to Holbein, who touched his works till not a touch remained discernible." Twenty years earlier Edward Wright had written of Meyer's youngest boy—"The little naked boy could hardly have been outdone, if I may dare to say such a word, by Raphael himself." And in our own day that fine and measured critic, Mrs. Jameson, has spoken for generation upon generation who have thought the same thought before the Meyer-Madonna of Dresden, when she says of it: "In purity, dignity, humility and intellectual grace this exquisite Madonna has never been surpassed; not even by Raphael. The face, once seen, haunts the memory."
When Wright and Walpole saw this Dresden work at Venice, it was supposed to be "the family of Sir Thomas More"—Meier having slipped into "More" in the course of centuries, which had retained only the vivid impression
CHANCES AND CHANGES
1526-1530
| First visit to England—Sir Thomas More; his home and portraits—The Windsor drawings—Bishop Fisher—Archbishop Warham—Bishop Stokesley—Sir Henry Guildford and his portrait—Nicholas Kratzer—Sir Bryan Tuke—Holbein's return to Basel—Portrait-group of his wife and two eldest children; two versions—Holbein's children, and families claiming descent from him—Iconoclastic fury—Ruined arts—Death of Meyer zum Hasen—Another Meyer commissions the last paintings for Basel—Return to England—Description of the Steelyard—Portraits of its members—George Gysze—Basel Council summons Holbein home—"The Ambassadors" at the National Gallery; accepted identification—Coronation of Queen Anne Boleyn—Lost paintings for the Guildhall of the Steelyard; the Triumphs of Riches and Poverty—The great Morett portrait; identifications—Holbein's industry and fertility—Designs for metal-work and other drawings—Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. |
Two years earlier Erasmus had evidently thought that London was the true stage for such a genius as Holbein's, and More had
This illustration represents More and his only son seated with Ægidius, or Peter Gillis, in the latter's own garden at Antwerp, listening to the tale of Utopia from the ancient comrade of Amerigo Vespucci. And very likely Holbein himself sat in this garden, in the late summer of 1526, when he was passing through Antwerp to England. He had a letter of introduction from Erasmus to Ægidius, as also to the host who was expecting him in England—Sir Thomas More.
Van Mander says that long before this the Earl of Arundel, when pausing at Basel, had been so much pleased with Holbein's works in that city that he had urged the painter to forsake it for London. But it would pretty surely have been the promise of More's influence which actually induced him to try his fortune so far afield. And by the autumn of 1526 he was one of that happy company which the genial soul of More drew around him in his
Early in 1527, probably, Holbein had finished the fine portrait of his host, which is now in Mr. Huth's collection. The study for this oil painting is among the Windsor drawings (Plate 20), as also one for the large family picture now lost, if indeed it was ever completed by Holbein; a matter of some doubt, notwithstanding Van Mander's account of it in the possession of the art-collector Van Loo. An outline sketch of it, or for it, he certainly made. And that precious pen-and-ink outline,—with the name of each written above or
In Mr. Huth's oil portrait More is wearing a dark-green coat trimmed with fur, and showing the purple sleeves of his doublet beneath. His eyes are grey-blue. He never wore a beard, made the fashion by Henry VIII. at the same time that the head was "polled,"—a singularly ugly combination,—until he was in the Tower and grew that beard which he smilingly swept away from the path of the executioner's axe. "It," he said with astonishing self-possession, could be "accused of no treason." In 1527, however, no shadow of tragedy seemed possible unless the suspicion of it slept in More's own heart when he said to his son-in-law, in answer to some flattering congratulation on the King's favour, "Son Roper, if my head could win him a castle in France, my head should fall."
But for these superb drawings in the Royal Collection at Windsor, we should know nothing at all of many a portrait Holbein painted—all among the immediate friends of More and Erasmus on this first visit to England; nor, for
Of the drawings which represent a lost painting, there is a noble one of Bishop Fisher, whose execution preceded More's by only a few weeks. A literally venerable head it was (Plate 21), to be the shuttlecock of papal defiance and royal determination not to be defied with impunity. For assuredly if the life of the Bishop of Rochester hung in the balance, as it did, in May, 1535, it was Paul III.'s mad effrontery in making him a Cardinal while he was actually in the Tower under his sovereign's displeasure which heated the King's anger to white-hot brutality. "Let the Pope send him a hat," he thundered, "but I will so provide that he shall wear it on his shoulders, for head he shall have none to set it on!" And on the 17th of that June he made good the savage oath. Yet the painter, after all, has been more potent than the King. For here lives Fisher. Bishop or Cardinal this is the man, as More loved him.
A striking and richly painted oil portrait of Erasmus's "MÆcenas," Archbishop Warham,
Holbein painted a prelate of a very different sort in the oil portrait of John Stokesley, Bishop of London, which is preserved at Windsor Castle. And yet he dared to paint the Truth—now as always. The painting is a masterpiece of modelling and soft transparency of light and shade. But the truculent, lowering countenance leaves small doubt that the sitter was a gentleman pre-eminently "gey ill to live wi'."
There is another oil painting at Windsor which has not escaped the injuries of time, but is none the less a splendid survival of 1527. This is the portrait of Sir Henry Guildford, Master of the Horse to Henry VIII., and holder of many another office of trust (Plate 22).
Sir Henry, a warm friend to both More and Erasmus, was forty-nine when he sat for this portrait. Under his black fur-trimmed surcoat he wears a doublet of gold brocade. In his hand is the wand of office as Chamberlain, and he is decorated with the collar and badge of the Garter.
He was always a great favourite with the King from the time when the latter came to the throne and young Guildford, then twenty, was one of the gayest, bravest, most loyal spirits about it. Always as ready for a real battle as a mimic one; as clever at writing plays for the King's amusement as at acting in them; as good in a revel as at a piece of diplomacy; it is not much wonder that his knighthood in 1512 should but have been the prelude to a long series of promotions.
The affection of master and man, too, was singularly sincere for a court. Sir Henry loyally supported the King's demand for a divorce, but he was by no means ready to support a second marriage without the papal preliminary. Hence he was not a persona
Erasmus had asked Ægidius to assist Holbein's success in any way he could. And it was probably owing to a letter from the Antwerp scholar that a friendship of many years sprang up between the painter and Nicholas Kratzer of Munich, then Astronomer-Royal at the Court
In the Munich Gallery there is another portrait in oils which has undergone, if possible, still more atrocious treatment than Kratzer's; yet, like it, still keeps enough of its original charm to rivet attention in any company. This latter is one of the most striking of the half-dozen portraits of Sir Bryan Tuke, which
But the Munich portrait also shows a far deeper bond of interests than one of money. The undercurrent of their natures ran in a groove of more than common sympathy; and to an analyst, such as Holbein was, the reflections behind these inscrutable eyes were full of unusual attraction.
Myself, I feel convinced, for more than one reason, that it is a work of some years later. But as a consensus of authorities places it during this visit, the picture is noticed here. It gains rather than loses by reproduction;—since the painting now shows a strange disagreeable colour most unlike the carnations of Holbein. But the composition is unmistakable (Plate 24). Between the sitter and the green-curtained background stands perhaps the ghastliest of all Holbein's skeletons,—one hand on his scythe, the other grimly pointing at the nearly-spent sands of the hour-glass. Below the latter is a tablet on which, in Latin, are the words of Job: "My short life, does it not
Before the researches of Eduard His, it used to be sometimes said that Holbein had virtually deserted his family when he left Basel in 1526. We know now, however, that whatever were the moral wrongs which he suffered or committed, he never forsook the duty of providing for his wife and children in no ungenerous proportion to his means.
The records show that the fruit of his two years' industry was used to acquire a comfortable home which remained the property of his wife. And the inventory of its contents at Elsbeth's death, some six years after Holbein's death, proves that this home was to the full as well furnished and comfortable as was usual with people of similar condition.
In the summer of 1528 the painter bade farewell
But by the latter part of August Holbein was back in that now sadly-altered Basel whence his best friends were reft by trouble or death. And on the 29th of August, 1528, he bought the house next to Froben's Buchhaus, the deed attesting that he did so in person, in company with Elsbeth. The price, 300 guldens or florins, was by no means the small one it now seems, nor could the painter pay the whole sum at once. He paid down one-third, and secured the rest by a mortgage. The site of this house is now occupied by 22 St. Johann Vorstadt. Three years later, March 28th, 1531, Holbein bought out a disagreeable neighbour;
It must have been in the year after the purchase of the larger house that he painted the group of his wife and the two children she had then borne him. This life-size group, done in oils on paper, is now in the Basel Museum (Plate 25). The stoical sincerity with which they are represented, and the hard outline produced by cutting out the work to mount it on its wood panel, makes a somewhat repellent impression at the first glance. And this is in no way dispersed by studying Elsbeth's traits. But the painting itself is a tour-de-force. By sheer Quality Holbein has invested these portraits,—a middle-aged, coarse-figured, unamiable-looking woman, a very commonplace infant, and a bright-faced boy,—with the prestige
| PLATE_25 |
| PLATE 25. ELSBETH, HOLBEIN'S WIFE, WITH THEIR TWO ELDEST CHILDREN Oils. Basel Museum Click to ENLARGE |
Clearly Elsbeth Holbein was not one to give up the costume of her youth simply because she would have been well advised to do so; and the cut and fashion of her dress remains almost identical with the drawing in the Louvre. Her lustreless light-brown hair is covered with a gauzy veil and a reddish-brown cap. Her brown stuff upper garment, trimmed with thin fur, shows a dark-green dress beneath it. The baby wears a gown of undyed woollen material, and the boy a jacket of dark bluish green.
Out of such unpromising materials has the painter made a picture that would challenge attention among any. If we knew nothing as to the identity of this woman, sitting oblivious of the children at her knee, wrapped in her own dark thoughts, we should certainly want to know something of her story and of the story of the little fellow whose eyes are breathlessly intent upon some purer, sweeter vision. There is at Cologne, in a private collection, a deeply interesting duplicate of this work; also on paper afterwards mounted on wood, but not cut out. Unfortunately this latter has suffered such irremediable injuries that it is quite impossible now to pronounce upon its claim to be
"Love towards God consists in Charity.
Who hath this love can feel no hate."5
It is difficult to see on what grounds Woltmann, who was inclined to accept the picture as genuine, should hold the inscription to have been added by someone desirous of increasing the value of the work by representing it to be an allegorical picture of Charity. There was never a time when the allegory, if accepted, could have carried the same value as the portraits. And surely the second line is utterly inconsistent with the theory. Original or not, it has a very startling likeness to a plea which Holbein himself must have urged more than once, to soften a bitterness his own errors could not have tended to cure.
When the Basel painting was cut out to be mounted, the last numeral was lost; so that it now stands dated 152-. But all the other facts
It may be as well to say here, once for all, as much as need be said of Holbein's family. As already stated, his wife survived him by six years, dying at Basel in 1549. By her first marriage she had one son, Franz Schmidt—who seems to have been a worthy and successful man of trade. She was the mother of four children by her marriage with Holbein;—Philip, born 1522; Katharina, 1527; Jacob, about 1530; and KÜnegoldt, about 1532.
Some years before the painter's death he took Philip Holbein to Paris, and there apprenticed him to the eminent goldsmith, Jerome David, with whom he remained until a couple of years after Holbein's death. Later, he somehow drifted to Lisbon, where he followed his trade until he settled in the old home of his grandfather and great-grandfather, Augsburg. In 1611 his son, Philip Holbein, junior, then "Imperial Court Jeweller" at Augsburg, petitioned the Emperor Matthias for letters patent to "confirm" his right to certain noble arms. The claims put forward
The younger boy, Jacob, was a goldsmith in London after Holbein's death. The evidence seems to show that he was never here previous to that event,—which of itself may have first occasioned his coming, though hardly at the time, as Jacob was not more than thirteen at
Katharina, the elder daughter, the baby of the Basel painting, seems to have left no descendants. She married a butcher of Basel and died in 1590. And in the same year, very likely from one of the frequent epidemics so fatal to Basel, died KÜnegoldt, Elsbeth's youngest child. The Merian family of Frankfurt-am-Main claims an hereditary right to the artistic gifts of its famous copper-engraver, Mathew Merian, as descendants of Holbein through this daughter KÜnegoldt, who, when she died, was the wife of Andreas Syff, a miller, of Basel. According to the greatest authority on this subject, Eduard His, to whose exhaustive researches we owe almost all that is known of Holbein's family, the Merian claims have not, so far, been proved by actual archives; but he is of opinion that there is considerable circumstantial evidence to support their claim to be lineal descendants of Holbein through the female line.
But in 1529, when the family group was painted, neither Jacob nor KÜnegoldt were yet born; and the painter was much more concerned
And dark enough was the outlook in Basel, where the Lutheran agitation had, as Erasmus said, "frozen the arts." Before Holbein came back from England many churches had abjured all pictures. The tide of religious antagonism had, as we know, driven both Erasmus and Bonifacius Amerbach for a time to a Catholic stronghold; and had driven their old friend Meyer to do literal battle on behalf of the Church.
Altar paintings were out of the question. And Holbein could but devote himself to designs for the printers and for goldsmiths. Many beautiful compositions for both crafts remain to testify of his matured powers and constant industry. The exquisite designs for dagger-sheaths, in particular, are rightly counted among the treasures of art. But in the summer of 1530 came a commission for the painter's last great work in Basel. This was the long-delayed order for the decoration of that vacant wall in the Council Hall, which adjoined the house zum Hasen.
Oddly enough, this commission also came officially through a burgomaster, Jacob Meyer. But the Meyer of 1530, Meyer "of-the-Stag"
But something of his spirit, something of what he himself had been preaching to Basel in warning and threat for years, seems to have passed on into the pictures Holbein set before the Council. The paintings, alas! are no more. But a fragment or two and the drawings for them show how truly grand the two works were
Both subjects are treated in the Great manner. Rehoboam, leaning forward from his throned seat with flashing eyes, and his little finger seeming actually to quiver in the air, is wonderfully conceived. But the meeting of Samuel and Saul (Plate 26) most splendidly demonstrates how far Holbein towered above mere portraiture when he had the opportunity. To picture this drawing in all the beauty of colour is to realise what we have lost, and what his just fame has lost, with the utter destruction of such works.
| PLATE_26 |
| PLATE 26. Behold to obey is better than sacrifice SAMUEL DENOUNCING SAUL Washed Drawing. Basel Museum Click to ENLARGE |
Not the greatest of the Italians could have improved upon the distribution and balance of this composition. The blazing background, the sense of a densely crowded host beyond what the eye can grasp, of captives and captors
Doubtless the Protestant party read its own meanings into these texts, when once the pictures were painted and paid for with seventy-two good guldens. But two very significant facts form their own commentary. One is that the only employment he received from the Council afterward was to redecorate the old LÄllenkÖnig monstrosity on the bridge!—and the other, that as soon as Holbein got his pay for this disgraceful
Things had changed in London also, and gravely, Holbein found, since he had quitted Sir Thomas More's home at Chelsea with the sketch for Erasmus, in the summer of 1528. He had barely settled himself, in the City this time, before the struggle between Henry VIII. and the English Clergy ended in that Convocation when the latter made its formal "Submission." And in the same month that this took place, Sir Henry Guildford died. Then the three great Acts of Parliament, which swept away the crying abuses of "Benefit of Clergy," resurrected the "dead"
This legislation was followed by the solemn protest and then the death of Archbishop Warham. So that now of that great and close quartet of friends,—Colet, Warham, More, and Erasmus,—there were two on either shore of the last crossing. And More could already see the dark river ahead. His eye marked the consequences of the Acts as keenly as his aged friend Warham had discerned them on his death-bed; and shortly after the "Submission," More resigned his great office as Chancellor.
These seem matters too high to twist the threads of a poor painter's life. But in reality Holbein's career was shaped, from many a year back, by such events as rarely touch the humble individual directly. All his friends and all his patrons in this country were carried far out of reach by 1532; and he must sink or swim, as they in darker waters, according to his own powers. That under such unexpected ill-fortune he did not immediately sink
The roots of the Steelyard (Stahlhof), or "Stilyard," as it is often called in early dramatists, go far back to the legendary centuries of English history. From before the time of Alfred the Great, traders from Germany had clustered together on the bank of the Thames, close to where Cannon Street Station now stands. Amalgamation with the Hanseatic League, and the necessities and gratitude of more than one king of England—but especially of Edward IV.—had made of the Steelyard a company such as only the East India Company of later centuries may be compared to. With the world's new geography and new commercial conditions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its methods and its monopoly of the seas were gradually superseded by the great seamen of the Elizabethan era. But in Holbein's time, though already some of the Hanseatic ships were too overgrown to pass London Bridge and cast anchor
Its walled and turreted enclosure, able to withstand the fiercest assaults of Wat Tyler's men, stretched from the river northward to Thames Street, and from Allhallows Street on the east to Dowgate Street on the west; and it might well have been described as a German city and port situated in the heart of the City of London. Its massive front in Thames Street, where were its three portcullised and fortified gateways with German inscriptions above and the Imperial Double-Eagle high over all, was one of the sights of London. And the Steelyard Tavern was a famous resort. When Holbein knew it well the greatest prelates and nobles and all the Court crowd,—which stretched its gardens and great houses from the stream of the Fleet, just west of the City wall, to Westminster Abbey,—used to flock to this Thames Street corner of the Steelyard to drink Rhenish wine and eat smoked reindeer-tongue and caviar.
Within the gates stood the big Guildhall, which answered both for its councils and its noted banquets. The high carved mantelpieces and wainscotting served admirably to display the
Away down to the docks ran the lanes of warehouses; shops and booths where every German trader or craftsman in London had his place; and where the merchandise of the world—the greater part of it destined for LÜbeck as a centre of European distribution—might be sampled. Here were choicest specimens of the then costly spices of Cathay, or the famous falcons of Norway and Livonia, for which English sportsmen were willing to pay fabulous prices.
No chapel was erected within its enclosure, the Guild preferring to be incorporated with the adjoining parish of Allhallows. Whether or not there is any truth at the bottom of the ancient tradition that this church had been originally founded by Germans, the Guild maintained its own altar in it in Holbein's time, where Masses were said on its own special days and festivals. So far are the facts from the common supposition that the doctrines of Luther would find natural favour in such a community, that the latter only gradually came into the "Church of England" by the same slow processes which
Here, then, in this staunch citadel of his own faith, Holbein naturally found a new circle of friends among whom it must have been strangely easy to fancy himself back in the Fischmarkt of his young years, with Froben and Erasmus and Amerbach and Meyer zum Hasen.
The curtain rings up on his work for the Steelyard,—work which covered many years and more fine paintings than could even be enumerated here—with a superlative exhibition of all his powers. The oil portrait of Georg Gyze, or George Gisze, as it is often written, now in the Berlin Gallery (Plate 27), inscribed 1532, has called forth the enthusiastic eulogies of every competent judge. By a piece of rare good fortune it is in perfect preservation.
The young merchant is seated among his daily surroundings in the Steelyard. He is in the act of leisurely opening a letter addressed, "To the hand of the honourable JÖrg Gyze, my brother, in London, England" (Dem ersamen herrn JÖrg Gyzen zu Lunden in Engelant meinem broder to henden). The merchant's motto, "No pleasure without care," is chalked up in Latin on the background, with his signature beneath it. Written on a paper stuck higher up is a Latin verse in praise of the portrait; also the date, and the sitter's age—thirty-four. On the racks and shelves are documents, books, keys, a watch and seals, and a pair of scales. A gold ball is hanging from above with a lovely chasing in blue enamel; a miracle of painting in itself, to say nothing of the exquisite Venetian glass, filled with water and carnation-pinks. This flower has its own meaning, and is introduced in more than one of Holbein's portraits. On the rich oriental table-cloth are writing materials also, with account-books, seal and scissors.
Gyze himself is a fair-haired man, wearing a brilliant red silk doublet beneath his black
As has been said, the Steelyard portraits are too many to even catalogue here, covering many years. But Gyze's may be taken as their high-water mark. For that matter it could not, in its own way, be surpassed by any portrait. Holbein himself greatly surpassed it in the matter of subtle and noble simplicity, in his two greatest extant pieces of portraiture—the Morett of Dresden and the Duchess of Milan, now in our National Gallery. But in technical powers, and the power of subordinating their very virtuosity to the requirement of a true picture, this was a superlative expression of his matured method.
By the time Holbein received this letter, written late in the autumn of 1532, he was plunged into a year of almost incredible activity. The whole of it would hardly seem too long for one such painting as the life-size double portrait—his largest extant portrait-painting—that now belongs to the National Gallery: "The Ambassadors" (Plate 28).
At the extremities of a heavy table, something like a rude dinner-waggon, are two
As has been noted, the complexion of the man at our right is singularly pallid; the eyes mournfully listless; the skin of his knuckles drawn into the wrinkles of wasting tissues. He wears a scholar's cap and gown; the latter of some chocolate-brown pile, richly patterned, and lined with brown fur. He holds his gloves
An oriental cover is spread on the table, and upon it are a number of the scientific instruments common to astrology and to the uses of astronomers like Kratzer, in whose portrait at the Louvre they are also to be seen. On the lower shelf are mathematical and musical instruments and books. The two latter are opened to display their text conspicuously. Near the man at our left, and kept open by a T-square, is the Arithmetic which Peter Apian, astronomer and globe-maker, published in 1527. It is opened at a page in Division, with its German text plainly legible and identical with the actual page, as seen in the British Museum's copy of this edition.
The book nearest the man at our right, lying beneath the lute, has been also identified as Luther's Psalm-book with music,—in which the German text is by himself and the music by Johann Walther—first published in 1524. Mr. Barclay Squire has shown that the two hymns could not, however, have faced each other in reality, as they do in the painting, without the intervening leaves having been
The background is a green-diapered damask curtain most significantly drawn aside to show a silver crucifix high up in the left-hand corner, above the man with the dagger and sword. On the beautiful mosaic pavement is an ugly object that looks like some dried fish. But experiments have shown that the French Sale-Catalogues in which this work first appears in the eighteenth century—first, that is, so far as we can trace it by any records now known—were right in calling this a "skull in perspective"; i.e. a skull painted as seen distorted in a convex mirror. Some hint of its true character can be gathered, though not much, by looking at this object from the lower left-hand corner of the painting, when the exaggerated length will be seen to be reduced to something more nearly approaching the height of the usual "Death's Head."
According to the views which are now officially accepted by the National Gallery, the persons of this picture are two French Catholics. The one at our left is Jean de
The man in the scholar's cap and gown is George de Selve, privately associated with de Dinteville's mission for a few weeks in the spring of 1533. He was born in 1508, nominated Bishop of Lavaur in 1526, and confirmed in that office in 1529, in which year he was French Ambassador at the Court of Charles V. He was twenty-five in 1533, and died in 1541.
For myself, holding convictions concerning these portraits utterly at variance with any published opinions—and that in more than one vital respect—I am compelled to limit my account to the bare record of its appearance and catalogued description, until prepared to submit other facts and conclusions to a verdict.
Two portraits in the Hague Gallery, each with a falcon hooded on the wrist, show to how much purpose Holbein had studied these birds
In 1533, also, the Steelyard placed its contribution to the celebration of Anne Boleyn's coronation in the painter's hands. And the result was, as Stowe tells us, "a costly and marvellous cunning pageant by the merchants of the Stilyard, wherein was the Mount Parnassus, with the Fountaine of Helicon, which was of white marble; and four streams without pipe did rise an ell high and mette together in a little cup above the fountaine; which fountaine ran abundantly with Rhenish wine till night. On the mountaine sat Apollo, and at his feet sat Calliope; and on every side of the mountaine sate four Muses, playing on severell sweet instruments."
But of more importance to his living fame were the two large oil paintings—the Triumph of Riches and the Triumph of Poverty—which he executed for the Hall of the Steelyard. In their day they were renowned far and wide; but they also have slipped into some abyss of oblivion, perhaps to be yet recovered as miraculously as was the Solothurn Madonna.
When the Guild was compelled to abandon
If they passed to the possession of the latter, he must have exchanged them with, or presented them to, the Earl of Arundel. For in 1627 Sandrart saw them in the collection of the latter, like his father an enthusiastic admirer of Holbein's work. After this, one or two vague notices suggest that they somehow drifted to Flanders, and thence to Paris. But there every trace of them is lost. Federigo Zucchero thought they yielded to no work of the kind, even among Italian masters; and copied them from pure admiration. Holbein's drawing for the Triumph of Riches is in the Louvre Collection.
That he ever painted Anne Boleyn, unless in miniature, seems doubtful. The portrait among the Windsor drawings which has been labelled with her name agrees with no description of her in any single respect. But in 1534 he
And it was probably about this time that he painted what is in some respects the greatest of all his portraits—one of the galaxy of supreme works of all portraiture—the oil painting of Morett, or Morette, so long regarded as a triumph of Leonardo da Vinci's art. The world knows it well in the Dresden Gallery (Plate 29).
The figure is life-size. The pose, even the costume in its feasible essentials, strikingly repeats the Whitehall portrait of Henry VIII., as copies show this to have been completed in the wall painting. The background is a green curtain.
The sitter wears neither velvet nor cloth-of-gold, nor Order of any sort; but his costume is rich black satin, the sleeves puffed with white, the broad fur collar of sable. In his cap is a cameo brooch. His buttons are gold; and a gold locket hangs from a plain, heavy chain of the same metal. His right hand carries his gloves, his left rests on the gold sheath of the dagger that hangs from his waist. His auburn hair and beard is streaked with grey.
No words, no reproduction, can hope to express
This is another work which has undergone more than one transformation in the course of its records. As late as 1657 it was correctly ascribed to Holbein in the Modena Collection. But the first syllable of the sitter's name has been its only constant. In time Morett slipped into Moretta, and then—like Meier in the Madonna picture—into Morus. So far it seems to have clung to some English tradition. But when Morus got changed to Moro it was but natural for an Italian to think of Ludovico Sforza, "Il Moro." Long before this Holbein had become Olbeno; and thereafter a puzzle. When the portrait was labelled Sforza, however, who could its obviously great painter be but Leonardo? Et voilÀ! Thus the work passed to the Gallery and Catalogue of the Royal Collection at Dresden. And thus it long remained, as if to attest the true level of Holbein's genius.
But when the Gallery also acquired the drawing of the Arundel Collection, labelled "Mr.
On the other hand, M. Larpent has now shown that the Arundel drawing was down in a catalogue of 1746-7 as: "One Holbein, Sieur de Moret, one of the French hostage in England"; and also that a "Chas. sieur de Morette" is recorded among the four French hostages sent to England in 1519. It would thus appear that the painting is a portrait of Charles de Solier, seigneur de Morette; an eminent soldier and diplomatist of France; born in 1480, Ambassador to England more than once, and finally, in 1534.
PAINTER ROYAL
1536-1543
| Queen Jane Seymour—Death of Erasmus, and title-page portrait—The Whitehall painting of Henry VIII.—Munich drawing of Henry VIII.—Birth of an heir and the "Jane Seymour Cup"—Death of the Queen—Christina, Duchess of Milan—Secret service for the King—Flying visit to Basel and arrangements for a permanent return—Apprentices his son Philip at Paris—Portrait of the Prince of Wales and the King's return gift—Anne of Cleves—Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk—Catherine Howard—Lapse of Holbein's Basel citizenship—Irregularities—Provision for wife and children—Residence in London—Execution of Queen Catherine Howard—Marriage of Catherine Parr—Dr. Chamber—Unfinished work for the Barber-Surgeons' Hall—Death of Holbein—His will—Place of burial—Holbein's genius; its true character and greatness. |
These were years of pleasant friendships, too, as well as work and cares. Nicholas Bourbon, scholar and poet, after his sojourn in London, writes back in 1536: "Greet in my name as heartily as you can all with whom you know me to be connected by intercourse and
It was in this very year, 1536, that he received his commission to paint Anne Boleyn's successor, Jane Seymour, then on the throne the block had left vacant. The Vienna Gallery possesses this painting, of which another version is at Woburn Abbey, and the chalk drawing at Windsor (Plate 30).
The Queen was noted for her milk-white fairness, and Holbein has borrowed the pearly shadows of the lily in rendering it. The figure is a little under life-size. Her head-dress and
The Queen's portrait may properly be said to belong to the great wall painting which Holbein finished in 1537 for the Royal Palace at Whitehall. But before that date the painter's inner life had suffered one more great wrench. At midnight of July 12th, 1536, Erasmus died in the home that had been his own, except for the Freiburg interval, ever since John Froben's death in 1526; a death that had probably had much to do with Holbein's first departure from Basel. That event had uprooted the scholar from the old house zum Sessel, in the Fischmarkt, and transplanted him to the home of Froben's son, Hieronymus. The latter house, then known as zum Luft, is now No. 18, BÄumleingasse. And it was here that Erasmus passed away, his mind keeping to the last its humour and its interests in all around him. But no one, remembering how Fisher and More had died in the preceding year, can doubt but that the good old man was very willing to be gone, away from changed faces and changed ways—though Bonifacius Amerbach and young Froben were as sons to him.
And as he drew it, what ghosts of his own Past must have clustered around the lean little figure! What echoes and visions! The Rhine, the gardens, the clang of the press, the Fischmarkt, the friendly smiles at Froben's and Meyer's firesides; his marriage; the stars and dews and perfume of all his dreams in the years—those matchless years of a man's young
Ah, well! Those years, and the darker, sadder years that had led far from them, were now like his oldest friends—dead and buried. The Holbein of 1537 was painting the King of England on the wall of his Privy Chamber. There was a place for honest pride as well as for honest regret in his thoughts.
This painting perished with the palace in the fire of 1698. Charles II., however, had a small copy of it made by Leemput. And a portion of Holbein's original cartoon (Plate 31) in chalk and Indian ink, is in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire—the face much washed out by cleaning, and the outline pricked for transferring to the wall. The figures are life-size, but Walpole has already noticed how the massive proportions and solidly-planted pose of the King heighten the illusion of a Colossus. Behind him stands the admirably contrasted figure of Henry VII. The whole composition
| PLATE_31 |
| PLATE 31. KING HENRY VIII AND HIS FATHER (Fragment of Cartoon used for the Whitehall Wall-Painting) Duke of Devonshire's Collection Click to ENLARGE |
The pose and costume of Henry VIII. in the cartoon were, as Leemput's copy shows, faithfully carried out in the painting; but in the latter the face was afterwards turned to the full front view familiar to us in the many copies of the King's portrait which so long passed as works of Holbein, on the strength of reproducing his own painting. There is no evidence that he ever again painted Henry VIII. or that he executed any replica of this portrait. The old copy at Windsor Castle serves, however, to recall its details of costume; such as his brown doublet stiff with gold brocade and scintillating with the gleams of splendid jewels, his coat of royal red embroidered with gold thread and lined with ermine to match the wide collar; his plumed and jewelled cap; as also the huge gems on collar, pendant, rings, and the gold-hilted dagger in its blue velvet sheath.
But Holbein's own portrait of Henry VIII.—as shown by the original chalk study from life now in the Munich Gallery (Plate 32)—may in
| PLATE_32 |
| PLATE 32. KING HENRY VIII (Life-study; probably for the Whitehall Painting) Chalks. Munich Collection Click to ENLARGE |
To crown the King's pride, and to the no less intense delight of the whole nation which saw in this event the rainbow of every promise, at Hampton Court, on the 12th of October, 1537, Queen Jane Seymour gave birth to the son who was to reign so briefly as Edward VI. And it was doubtless in connection with this happy circumstance that the King commissioned Holbein's design for a truly royal piece of goldsmith's work. This drawing, generally known as "the Jane Seymour cup," is at Oxford, in the Bodleian Library (Plate 33).
No sketch of the artist's powers would be even barely complete without a realising sense of their versatility. And in this design Holbein has more than equalled the highest achievement of his great contemporary, Benvenuto Cellini, at this time in the service of the French Court. The initials of the King and Queen, H. and J., and the exceedingly judicious motto of the latter—"Bound to obey
In the midst of all the public rejoicings, the Te Deums, feasts, and bonfires, came the thunderclap of the young mother's death. Some negligence had permitted her to take cold, and on the twelfth day after his coveted heir was born, Henry VIII. was once again a widower. The Court went into deepest mourning until the 3rd of February. But Thomas Cromwell was very shortly authorised to take secret steps to ascertain what Princess might most suitably fill the late Queen's vacant place and strengthen the assurance of an unbroken succession.
Choice fell at first on a Roman Catholic—Christina, the sixteen-year-old widow of Francis Sforza Duke of Milan, who had died in the autumn of 1535. The upshot of private inquiries was that Holbein was sent over to Brussels in March, 1538, to bring back a portrait of this daughter of Christian of Denmark and niece
From this "perffight" painting, which could not have been more than one of his portrait studies, he afterwards completed that full-length oil painting which is worthy to rank with his great Morett portrait. By the kindness of the Duke of Norfolk, who has lent it, this beautiful work is now in the National Gallery (Plate 34). But unhappily for its best appreciation, to my thinking at least, it hangs at one side and in too close proximity to the bold colouring of "The Ambassadors"; so that its own subtle, yet reticent superiority is well-nigh shouted down by its lusty neighbour. It is a picture to be seen by itself; as it must stand by itself in the usual inane gallery of women's portraits.
Hutton tells us that the painter who "slobbered" Christina's portrait had painted her in full dress. But Holbein's eye was quick to recognise the values of her everyday dress—the widow's costume of Italy—in enhancing the distinction of her face and the stately slenderness of her figure. And so he drew her as she
| PLATE_34 |
| PLATE 34. CHRISTINA OF DENMARK, DUCHESS OF MILAN Oils. National Gallery [Lent by the Duke of Norfolk] Click to ENLARGE |
The portrait is nearly life-size. Over a plain black satin dress she wears a gown of the same material, lined with yellow sable. Her hair is entirely concealed by a black hood. At her throat and wrists are plain cambric frills. The ranging scale of tawny tones—in the floor, the gloves, the fur, the golden glint in her brown eyes—and the one ruby, on her hand, are the only colours, except those of her fresh young lips and skin and the black and white of her costume. "She is not so white as the late Queen," wrote Hutton, "but she hath a singular good countenance, and when she chanceth to smile there appeareth two pits in her cheeks and one in her chin, the which becometh her excellently well."
It is easy to believe that they did, but her dimples did not chance for Henry VIII. Whether she really sent him, along with her picture, the witty refusal credited to her—that she had but one head; had she two, one should be at His Majesty's service—or whether it was the Emperor's doing entirely that his niece married the Duke of Lorraine instead of the man
Van Mander heard from Holbein's circle a story which modern pedantry is inclined to flout. This is, that when an irate nobleman wanted the painter punished for an affront, the King hotly exclaimed:—"Understand, my lord, that I can make seven earls out of as many hinds, any day; but out of seven earls I could not make one such painter as this Holbein." An eminently ben-trovato story, at all events. And certain it is that the painter stood sufficiently high in the royal favour to be despatched on some special private mission for the King in the summer of 1538, of which the secret was so well kept that nothing beyond the record of payment for it has ever transpired.
From this date Holbein's name is regularly down in the Royal Accounts. The amounts drawn total, it has been computed, about £360 in present value, and would make an agreeable annual addition to his other earnings. So that it is little wonder he was not tempted by the small sum offered by the Basel Council in 1532. But in 1538 the Council greatly increased
His old companions of the Guild of St. Johann Vorstadt made this visit—when Holbein was back among them, as was noted, "in silk and velvet"—the occasion of a grand banquet in his honour. But the real motive for his visit was to arrange upon what terms he could meet the Council's wishes. The terms were far from ungenerous, as is shown by the contract which followed him back to London.
In this the Council bound itself, in consideration of the great honour of retaining in their city a painter "famous beyond all other painters on account of the riches of his art," and in further consideration of his promise to make no absence from Basel more prolonged than should be really necessary to carry his foreign commissions to their destination and receive his pay for them—to give him an annuity of fifty guldens, equally whether Holbein should be ill or well, but only during his own life. In addition to this, they granted him permission
There is every probability that Holbein himself took a goodly sum to Basel to invest for his family's permanent benefit in one way and another. For it could only have been as a part of this gleaning for them that he drew—as the Account Books show that he did just at this juncture—a whole year's salary in advance from the Royal Exchequer; seeing that the same books prove that he was liberally paid for all his own expenses on the King's service, in addition to his regular salary.
Part of the sum he collected to take with him was doubtless used to apprentice his son Philip, now sixteen, to the goldsmith's trade. And that the father chose Paris for this purpose, where he left Philip on his return journey, might well be due either to his own estimation of Jerome David, to whom Philip was indentured, or to the fact that Benvenuto Cellini's
His New Year's offering to the King on the opening of 1539 was a portrait, probably the oil painting in the Hague Gallery, of the infant Prince of Wales. It was a spirited picture of the royal baby with his gold rattle in his chubby little fist, such as might have delighted a father less doting than Henry VIII., whose return gift is recorded: "To Hans Holbyne, paynter, a gilte cruse with a cover, weighing x oz. 1 quarter." The cruse was made by a friend of the painter; that Cornelius Hayes, goldsmith, whom Bourbon's letter mentioned in connection with him in 1536.
All these months the negotiations for the
Her brother, the Duke of Cleves, was at this time a troublesome foe to the Emperor; while the fact that she was a Protestant was a "Roland" for the Imperial and Papal "Oliver." So Holbein was again posted off to bring back a counterfeit of Anne, and to carry to her a miniature of the King. And by the 1st September he had acquitted himself of the new mission.
There is not an iota of historical or other evidence for that "Flanders mare" anecdote, which seems to have had a gratuitous as well as spontaneous origin in Bishop Burnet's seventeenth-century brain, to the effect that the King was the victim of a flattering portrait by Holbein, and cruelly undeceived by the actual looks of his bride. In the first place his agents wrote to him frankly that the Princess was of
On the contrary, the painting, in oils on vellum and mounted on a panel, now in the Louvre (Plate 35), is the very embodiment of contemporary accounts of this Princess. Her fair-skinned, commonplace, yet "not uncomely" face looks out placidly at you from the quaint Flemish head-dress of fine gauze and jewelled cloth-of-gold. Her inert hands (Holbein's hands belong to his truth-telling revelations), jewelled even on the thumb, are listlessly clasped upon
No Venus certainly, and perhaps somewhat heavily handicapped by the maternal "elbowe." But still perfectly in keeping with her descriptions and making no denial to the French Ambassador's statement that she was "the gentlest and kindest" of queens; or to an English eye-witness who writes that at her coronation the people all applauded her for being "so fayre a Ladye, of so goodly a stature and so womanly a countenance, and in especial of so good qualities."
The fact is that the King's very cruelty to this poor girl—torn from her mother's side and her Protestant home in DÜrren to be the pawn of an unscrupulous diplomacy—was based on grounds, at least, less infamous than that of a slave-buyer. After both Cromwell and Holbein had been well rewarded for their services, the former lost his head and the Queen her crown on considerations that took no more account of her looks than her feelings. The Catholic glass had risen; the King himself was not ashamed to avow it; and the Protestant alliance was therefore an incubus. After some two months of a queen's and wife's estate, poor Anne of Cleves was bid to pack her belongings and take
But there was no law in England save the fiat of Henry VIII. The marriage was pronounced "null and void," and Anne retired into private life, on the rigid condition that she would make no attempt to ever quit England, with an allowance of £3,000 a year, and the formal title of the King's "sister." There was no help for her. Never again for her would there be the austere joys of DÜrren—her mother's side, her own timid dreams of other companionship, and never the price at which she had lost them.
At the head of the triumphant anti-Protestant, anti-Cromwell party stood Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk, whose portrait, in the Royal Collection at Windsor, Holbein painted about this time (Plate 36). The lean face and the figure clothed in red stand out strikingly from the plain green background, although the painting has suffered not a little injury. The robe is lined and trimmed with ermine, and over it is the collar and badge of the Order of the Garter. In his right hand he holds the gold baton of his office as Earl Marshal, and in his left the White Staff of the Lord Chamberlain.
Norfolk's star of influence had already waxed and waned with the evil destinies of one niece, before it arose anew with the fortunes of another only to plunge sharply after them into the gulf of ruin. For the present he and Gardiner, restored to favour with him, were all-powerful. Their calculations seemed to prosper, too, beyond their most ambitious dreams, when, instead of ruling through a rival to Anne who should be the King's mistress, they were to rule through a legal successor. For the King was nothing if not technically correct; and from the moment when the fatal royal glance flamed on Catherine Howard when Gardiner was entertaining him, nothing would do but she should become his wife. And thus once more the wild wheel of Fortune was to make Norfolk uncle to a Queen of England.
Anne was divorced on the 12th of July, 1540,
There is a miniature in the Windsor Collection now believed to be Holbein's portrait of Catherine Howard. Until recently it was held to be the portrait of Catherine Parr. But there is a larger portrait of the former among the Windsor drawings, a study evidently made for an oil painting (Plate 37). By this it seems that she had auburn hair, hazel eyes, a fair complexion, and a piquant smile. There is a painting which accords with this drawing in the Duke of Buccleuch's collection, but it is said to be by a French artist.
In the autumn of this year, 1540, the two years of absence expired which had been granted to Holbein by his contract with the Basel Council. But he had now formed ties which were too powerful to yield to Basel's. Those plans of painting again the walls by
Not only the Windsor chalk drawings, but the paintings at Vienna, Berlin, and other Continental galleries, show the pressure, as well as the high level of quality, at which he was now working. These portraits are among almost his very best, while the one shortly to be mentioned is quite among them.
By the summer of 1542 the tragedy of Catherine Howard was over. That Royal Progress, like more than one of its forerunners, had become the royal shame. This time it was a shame so black and so wide that within two years, after madness and death had purged the complicity of many, there still remained so many more involved in the sins and follies of Norfolk's niece that the ordinary prisons were unable to contain all that were arraigned; a shame so bitter that when the proofs of it were first laid before Henry VIII. the Privy Council quaked to see him shed tears. It was, they
On July 12th, 1543, the "next" year as it then began, the King married Catherine Parr. She had been twice widowed and was about to marry Sir Thomas Seymour when the King interfered, and she became his wife instead; though one can well credit the story that she tremblingly told him, "It were better to be his mistress." She was a good woman, a generous stepmother, and a good wife. But there is plenty of probability for the assertion that her own death had been debated with the King when her wit delayed it, and his death set her free to marry at last the man from whom the King had snatched her.
It was formerly believed, as has been said, that Holbein had painted her miniature—the one at Windsor, now declared to be the portrait of Catherine Howard. About this time he must have painted the great portrait of which
This work Holbein did not live to finish; and it is to-day exceedingly doubtful as to how much of the smoke-blackened painting is by him. The very drawing has a woodenness foreign to his compositions, and much of the painting is by an evidently inferior hand. But good judges hold some of the heads to be undoubtedly his work.
However this may be, with the autumn of 1543 Holbein's life came to a sudden close.
The Will bears about it evident signs of having been made in great haste and mental disturbance. But it accomplished all that Holbein probably had at heart; that is, the ensuring that whatsoever moneys could be collected from his accounts, or by the sale of "all my goodes and also my horse," should first be applied to clear a couple of specified debts, and the rest be managed for the sole benefit of "my two chylder which be at nurse." From the very fact that nothing as to the identity or whereabouts
No other heirs are mentioned; no other legacy is made. From the Will alone one who did not know otherwise would suppose that he had no other family or relatives in existence. The Plague left no man in its neighbourhood much leisure for explanations. Stowe records that the one of that autumn was such "a great death" that the Law Courts had to be transferred to St. Albans. But two things seem to speak in this curt document. First, that by the transference of his uncle Sigmund's little fortune to Franz Schmidt (as trustee for Elsbeth and the children of her marriage with Holbein), which the archives prove took place three years earlier, and by his other arrangements for his family at Basel and for Philip at Paris, Holbein held himself free of any further responsibility for their support, and, indeed, determined that they should not obtain possession of the residue in London.
And by November 29th Holbein's had come, and one executor's also, apparently. The Latin record of administration on this date is that it has been consigned to John Anwarpe (Johann or Hans of Antwerp), and accepted by him in accordance with "the last will of John, alias Hans Holbein, recently deceased in the parish of Saint Andrew Undershaft."
But, as they ran, those sands had measured more than "a great portrait-painter." They had measured Greatness; greatness which is not to be delimited by the wanton outrages of man or the accidents of time. Both have had their share in the judgments of generations that have lost all his greatest and nearly all his imaginative creations. And what the Spoiler has spared, the self-styled Restorer has too often ruined. Self-love, on the other hand, and family pride have been engaged to preserve
Of his mysticism, of the symbolism in which his "Journal Intime" is written in his own firm cipher, this little book is not the place to speak; though for those who have once come to know the true Holbein these have a spell, a stern, inexhaustible enchantment all their own.
But study the few fortunate survivals of his imaginative works, study even more the wrecks and skeletons of his loftier conceptions, and ask yourself if it could be by only a quick eye and a clever hand (and he had both, assuredly) that Holbein caught up the dying ember of the Van Eycks' torch and fanned it by his originality, his fancy, his winged realism, until its light lit up the dim ways of Man with a clairvoyance far beyond theirs. This eye, this mind, flung its gleaming penetration into every covert of the soul and deep, deep, deep into the most shrouded, the most shuddering secrets of Mortality.
Was it by virtue of a mere portrait-painter's powers that the son of the Augsburg Bohemian came to lay his finger upon the very core and composition of perhaps the haughtiest, the subtlest, the most dread despot since the CÆsars? Henry VIII. and Fisher; the LaÏs Corinthiaca,
Let us be just. Let us forget for a moment the chirp of the family housekeeper over her gods. Let us gather up the broken fragments that are more than the meal, and humbly own the Miracle that created them. It is idle to argue with the intelligence that can see "a want of imagination" in Holbein. But we can find proof and to spare that it is not so; that his so-called "limitations"—apart from method, which is a matter of Epoch—are due to a creed we may or may not agree with, but surely must respect. The creed that Beauty is the framework, the ornament, rather than the substance of things; the pleasure, not the purpose of "this mortal"; and that the sweetest flower that blows is but an exquisite moment of transfigured clay.
He smells the mould above the rose; yet how he draws the rose! The brazen arrogance of pomp, the pearl on a woman's neck, the
He has painted each, too, with that genius for seizing the essential quality which is the thing, that never forsook him from Augsburg to Saint Andrew's Undershaft; that singular, vivid, original genius which can well afford to let his grave be forgotten, whose works build for him, as Hans Holbein—
One of the few, the immortal names
That were not born to die.
FOOTNOTES.
Wer Liebe hat der Tragt kein Hass."
EXISTING WORKS OF
HANS HOLBEIN THE YOUNGER
ARRANGED, SO FAR AS CAN BE KNOWN,
IN CHRONOLOGICAL SEQUENCE
| **signifies | —Superlative qualities. |
| *signifies | —Of some particular importance. |
| ?signifies | —Authorities differ. Held by some (and by the writer) to have been, in its original condition, the work of Holbein's own hand. |
I.
EARLIEST INDIVIDUAL WORKS (BEFORE GOING TO BASEL)
| ? | St. Elizabeth of Hungary and St. Barbara. Oils. (Wings of the St. Sebastian altar-piece.) Munich Gallery. |
| Virgin and Child. Oils. Basel Museum. (Earliest signed work known. Dated 1514.) |
II.
FIRST BASEL PERIOD
(1515, 1516, 1519-1526)
| Illustrations to Erasmus's Praise of Folly. Eighty-two pen-and-ink sketches on the margins. Original copy, Basel Museum. | |
| Portrait of an unknown young man. Oils. Grand-Ducal Museum, Darmstadt. | |
| Bonifacius Amerbach. [Plate 6.] Oils. Basel Museum. | |
| Portrait of himself. [ | |
| * | Studies from Nature. (A bat outspread and a lamb.) |
| Drawings in water-colour and silver-point. Basel Museum. | |
| Designs for armorial windows. (More especially those with Landsknechte and one with three peasants gossiping.) Washed Drawings. Basel Museum and Print Cabinet, Berlin. | |
| Landsknechte in a hand-to-hand fight. [Plate 7.] Washed Drawing. Basel Museum. Others in various collections. | |
| Design for the wings of an organ-case. Washed Drawings. Basel Museum. | |
| Head of St. John the Evangelist. Oils. Basel Museum. | |
| The Last Supper. (On wood; ruined fragment.) Oils. Basel Museum. | |
| The Nativity [Plate 8.] and The Adoration. Oils. Freiburg Cathedral. (Wings of a lost altar-piece.) | |
| Holy Family. Washed Drawing. Basel Museum. (Also other drawings of the Virgin and Child.) | |
| The Passion. Eight-panelled altar-piece. [Plate 9.] Oils. Basel Museum. (Utterly ruined by over-painting.) | |
| * | The Passion. A series of ten designs for glass-painting. Washed Drawings. Basel Museum. (A set of seven reversed impressions in the British Museum.) |
| The Man of Sorrows and the Mater Dolorosa. Oils, in tones of brown. Basel Museum. | |
| Christ borne to the ground by the weight of the cross. A Washed Drawing and a *Woodcut (unique impression). Basel Museum. | |
| * | |
| ? | The risen Christ and Mary Magdalen at the sepulchre. [Plate 11.] Oils. Hampton Court Gallery. (Very much injured.) |
| St. George. Oils. Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe. | |
| St. Ursula. Oils. Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe. | |
| ? | Portrait of a young girl. [Plate 13.] Drawing in chalk and silver-point. Jabach Collection. The Louvre. |
| ** | The Solothurn Madonna. [Plate 12.] Oils. Solothurn Museum. ("Die Zetter'sche Madonna von Solothurn," of which the remarkable history is given in the text; together with the evident relationship of Plate 13 and the hypothesis of the present writer in that connection.) |
| ** | Portrait of Erasmus. [Plate 14.] Oils. The Louvre. |
| A Citizen's Wife, and others, in the dress of the time. Washed Drawings. Basel Museum. | |
| The Table of Cebes. Border for title-page. Woodcut. Royal Print Cabinet, Berlin. | |
| St. Peter and St. Paul; on the title-page of Adam Petri's reprint of Luther's translation of the New Testament. | |
| Alphabet of "The Dance of Death." Woodcuts. Proof-impressions in the Basel Museum, the British Museum, and the Dresden Royal Collection. | |
| Bible Pictures: illustrating Old Testament. Woodcuts. | |
| ** | "Images of Death." [Two shown at Plates 14 and 15.] Proof-impressions, some sets incomplete, in the Basel Museum, British Museum and the National Print Collections of Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Dresden, Karlsruhe, and the Bodleian Library. (This is the immortal series of Woodcuts, often called "The Dance of Death," done for the Trechsel Brothers of Lyons, but not published there until many years later.) |
| The above as LaÏs Corinthiaca. Oils. Basel Museum. | |
| ** | The Meyer Madonna. [Plates 18 and 19.] Oils. Grand-Ducal Collection, Darmstadt (superbly restored); and ?Dresden Gallery. (Notwithstanding the many and eminent authorities who hold this to be a copy, there still remain a sufficiency of no less eminent authorities to warrant the present writer in her unshaken opinion that, at any rate in its first estate and in the main, this Dresden version—revered for more than one century as such by the highest authorities—was the creation of Holbein's own hand.) |
III.
FIRST LONDON PERIOD
(1526-1528)
| Portrait of Sir Thomas More. Oils. Mr. Huth's Collection. Chalk Drawing at Windsor. [Plate 20.] (Also a drawing of Sir John More, father of the above.) | |
| ** | John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. [Plate 21.] Chalk Drawing. Windsor Castle. (Another in the British Museum.) |
| Archbishop Warham. Oils. The Louvre, and Lambeth Palace. | |
| ? | John Stokesley, Bishop of London. Oils. Windsor Castle. |
| Sir Henry Guildford. [Plate 22.] Oils. Windsor Castle. | |
| Lady Guildford. Oils. Mr. Frewen's Collection. | |
| Sir Thomas Godsalve and his son John. Oils. Dresden Gallery. | |
| Chalk Drawing of Sir John Godsalve. Windsor Castle. | |
| Nicholas Kratzer, Astronomer Royal to King Henry VIII. [Plate 23.] Oils. The Louvre. | |
| Sir Henry Wyat. Oils. The Louvre. | |
| Sir Bryan Tuke, Treasurer of the Household to King Henry VIII. Oils. Munich Gallery. [Plate 24.] Also at Grosvenor House. (As stated in the text, the writer holds that the portraits of Sir Bryan Tuke should properly be classed with those of a later period. But they are given here in accordance with opinions which obtain at present.) |
IV.
LAST BASEL PERIOD
(1528-1531)
| ** | Portrait group of Holbein's wife, Elsbeth, and his two eldest children. [Plate 25.] Oils, on paper. Basel Museum. (Outline hard from having been cut out and mounted.) |
| King Rehoboam replying to his people, and **Samuel denouncing Saul. [Plate 26.] Two Washed Drawings. Basel Museum. (These are the designs for "the back wall" of the Basel Council Chamber.) | |
| "Portrait of an English Lady" (unknown). Chalk Drawing. Basel Museum. | |
| ** | Portrait of an unknown young man in a broad-brimmed hat. Chalk Drawing. Basel Museum. (This is one of the most beautiful of Holbein's portrait studies. There is a soft, yet virile, witchery about it which haunts the memory.) |
| Round Portrait of Erasmus. (Bust, ¾ view.) Oils. Basel Museum. | |
| Designs for dagger-sheaths and other goldsmith's work. Washed Drawings. Basel Museum, British Museum, etc. (More especially the "Dance of Death"; a chef-d'oeuvre.) | |
| A ship making sail. Washed Drawing. StÄdel Institut. Frankfurt. |
V.
LAST PERIOD; LONDON
(1531-43)
| ** | Portrait of JÖrg Gyze. [Plate 27.] Oils. Berlin Gallery. |
| Portrait of an unknown man. Oils. SchÖnborn Gallery, Vienna. | |
| Johann or Hans of Antwerp. Oils. Windsor Castle. (Holbein's friend and executor.) | |
| Derich Tybis of Duisburg. Oils. Imperial Gallery, Vienna. | |
| Derich Born. Oils. Munich Gallery, and Windsor Castle. | |
| Derich Berck. Oils. Petworth. | |
| Unknown Man. Oils. Prado Gallery, Madrid. | |
| The Triumph of Riches. Drawing. The Louvre. (Copies of this and the pendant design, The Triumph of Poverty, in the British Museum and in the Collection of Lady Eastlake.) | |
| The Queen of Sheba before Solomon. Washed Drawing, heightened with gold and colours. Windsor Castle. | |
| Robert Cheseman, with falcon. Oils. Hague Gallery. | |
| * | "The Ambassadors." [Plate 28.] Oils. National Gallery. (A double portrait, life size. Formerly supposed to be Sir Thomas Wyatt and a scholar; now officially held to be Jean de Dinteville, Bailli de Troyes, and George de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur. As stated in the text, the present writer differs from any identification of either figure yet published, but is not prepared to put forward her own views for the present.) |
| Nicholas Bourbon de Vandoeuvre, scholar and poet. Chalk Drawing. Windsor Castle. (An intimate | |
| ** | The Morett Portrait. [Plate 29.] Oils. Dresden Gallery. (Long believed to be a triumph of Leonardo da Vinci's art, and the portrait of Ludovico Sforza, "Il Moro." At one time held to be Henry Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. Afterwards "established" and catalogued as Hubert Morett, goldsmith to King Henry VIII. Following M. Larpent's suggestion, however, it is now supposed to be the portrait of Charles Solier, Sieur de Morette. But as to this the last word may yet remain to be said. The drawing which the majority of authorities hold to be the study for this painting now hangs near it.) |
| Thomas Cromwell. Oils. Tittenhanger. | |
| ** | Miniature portrait of Henry Brandon, son of the Duke of Suffolk. Windsor Castle. |
| Title-page used in Coverdale's Bible. Woodcut. | |
| Q. Jane Seymour. [Plate 30.] Oils. Imperial Gallery, Vienna. | |
| ** | Portrait of Erasmus, full length, in scholar's robes, with his hand on the head of the god Terminus. Woodcut. Frontispiece to Hieronymus Froben's edition of Erasmus's Works, published in 1540. (Commonly known as "Erasmus in a surround," or niche.) |
| Fragment of the Cartoon [Plate 31] used for the four royal portraits in the wall-painting at Whitehall. The fragment shows only the figures of King Henry VIII. and his father. Hardwick Hall. (Remigius van | |
| ** | Portrait study of the face of King Henry VIII. [Plate 32.] Chalk Drawing. Royal Print Cabinet, Munich. (Probably the Life-study for the Whitehall painting. If nothing else remained, this mask alone would incontestably rank Holbein among the Masters of all time. To the writer's thinking, at any rate, it stands among the very few works of art which it would be difficult to match, and impossible to surpass in its own colossal qualities.) |
| ** | Design for "the Jane Seymour Cup." [Plate 33.] Bodleian Library. |
| ** | Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan. [Plate 34.] Oils. National Gallery; lent from Arundel Castle. |
| Edward VI., when infant Prince of Wales. Oils. Hanover Gallery, and Lord Yarborough's Collection. | |
| Anne of Cleves. [Plate 35.] Oils on Vellum. The Louvre. | |
| Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk. [Plate 36.] Oils. Windsor Castle, and Arundel Castle. | |
| Catherine Howard. [Plate 37.] Chalk Drawing. Windsor Castle. (The Miniature at Windsor Castle, formerly said to be Holbein's portrait of Catherine Parr, is now said to be Catherine Howard. If so, it is somewhat difficult to reconcile it with the drawing, which latter seems much more in keeping with the descriptions of her traits.) | |
| Sir Nicholas Carew. Oils. Dalkeith Palace. Chalk Drawing. Basel Museum. | |
| Simon George of Cornwall. Oils. StÄdel Institut, Frankfurt. | |
| Miniature portrait of Charles Brandon, son of the Duke of Suffolk. Windsor Castle. | |
| Lady; unknown. Oils. Imperial Gallery, Vienna. Also a fine portrait of an unknown man. Oils. Same Gallery. | |
| Sir Richard Southwell. Oils. Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Chalk Drawing. Windsor Castle. | |
| John Reskymeer. Oils. Hampton Court Gallery. | |
| Nicholas Poyntz. Oils. De la RosiÈre Collection, Paris. Chalk Drawing. Windsor Castle. | |
| Sir John Russell. Oils. Woburn Abbey. Chalk Drawing. Windsor Castle. | |
| Three portraits; men unknown. Oils. Berlin Gallery. | |
| Designs for jewelry, ornamental panels, clocks, chimney-piece, etc., etc. Washed Drawings. British Museum, Basel Museum, etc. | |
| Many fine portraits of which no versions in oils are known. Chalk Drawings. Windsor Castle. Among these one of Edward VI. as boy Prince of Wales, the Duchess of Suffolk, Sir Thomas Wyatt, etc., etc. | |
| Dr. John Chamber, or Chambers. Oils. Imperial Gallery, Vienna. | |
| Also many other oil-portraits, more or less genuine, in various Collections. |
The Literature of Holbein's Life, much more of his Works, is far too extensive to admit of a Bibliography in a volume of this sort. But the following List will be found to contain (or themselves refer the reader to) all that is of essential importance to even the most complete study of this Master.
- Carel van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, etc., 1604.
- The above translated into French, and admirably edited by M. Henri Hyman. 2 tom., 1884.
- Alfred Woltmann, Holbein und seine Zeit. Zweite umgearbeitete Auflage, 1874. 2 Bde.
- There is an English translation of the First Edition of 1871, by F. E. BunnÈtt; but unfortunately its views on many vital points are reversed by Woltmann himself in his latest edition.
- R. N. Wornum, Some Account of the Life and Works of Hans Holbein, 1867.
- Corrected in many respects by the author in a monograph on "The Meier Madonna," 1891.
- Paul Mantz, Hans Holbein. Paris, 1879.
- H. Knackfuss, Holbein. Leipzig, 1899.
- English translation of the above by Mr. Campbell Dodgson.
- Eduard His, Die Basler Archive Über Hans Holbein den Jungern.
- In Zahn's JahrbÜcher fÜr Kunstwissenschaft, 1870.
- Francis Douce, The Dance of Death, 1833.
- J. R. Smith, Holbein's Dance of Death, 1849.
- (Especially fine reproductions.)
- H. N. Humphreys, Holbein's Dance of Death, 1868.
- G. Th. Fechner, Über die Deutungsfrage der Holbein'schen Madonna. Die Älteste historische Quelle Über die Holbein'sche Madonna.
- Both in Archiv fÜr die zeichnenden KÜnste, 1866, I., 4. These give all the known facts of the history of the Meyer Madonnas of Darmstadt and Dresden.
- S. Larpent, Sur le portrait de Morett. Christiania, 1881.
- Mary F. S. Hervey, Holbein's "Ambassadors," 1900.
- This volume also embodies, and gives the references to, the original identifications of Professor Sidney Colvin, and the suggested identifications of Mr. C. L. Eastlake; as well as to the contribution concerning the hymn-book by Mr. Barclay Squire.
- W. F. Dickes, Holbein's "Ambassadors" Unriddled, 1903.
- F. A. Zetter-Collin, Die Zetter'sche Madonna von Solothurn. Ihre Geschichte aus Originalquellen, etc.
- In Festschrift des Kunst-Vereins der Stadt Solothurn, 1902.
- Artur Seeman, Der Brunnen des Lebens, von H. Holbein.
- In Zeitschrift fÜr bildende Kunst. Mai, 1903. With a superb illustration in colour.
"Adoration," painting, 71
"Ambassadors, The," painting, 145-9, 193
Amerbach, Basilius, 66
Bonifacius, 25, 46-50, 99, 125
Johann, 48, 61
Anne, of Cleves, Queen, 171-4
Antwerp, Johann or Hans of, 183
Arundel, Henry Fitzalan, Earl of, 184
Thomas Howard, Earl of, 151
William Fitzalan, Earl of, 115
Augsburg, 10, 11, 16
BÄr, Hans, 24, 25
Magdalena, first wife of Meyer zum Hasen, 31
Barber-Surgeons, Guild of, 180
Basel, description of, 58-64
decoration of the Rathhaus by Holbein, 83-5, 132, 135, 170
decoration of the LÄllenkÖnig by Holbein, 135
offers of an annuity to Holbein, 145, 168, 169, 176, 177
Basel, banquet to Holbein, 168
Beatus Rhenanus, 68
Berne, 12
Bible, translations before the Reformation, 23, 24
Boleyn, Anne, Queen, 150, 151
Bourbon, Nicholas, 156, 157, 193
Bourges, 99
Burgkmair, Hans, 11
Butts, Sir William, 180
Cellini, Benvenuto, 169-70
Chamber, John, 180
Cheseman, Robert, 150
"Christ in the Grave," painting, 78-80
Christ in Holbein's Art, 77-83
Christina, Duchess of Milan, 144, 164-7
Colet, John, Dean of St. Paul's, 22, 137
Cromwell, Thomas, Earl of Essex, 152
"Dance of Death," 100-103
Darmstadt, "Meyer-Madonna" at, 108-13
David, Gerard, 53
David, Jerome, 169
Diesbach, Nicholas von, 89, 90
Dinteville, Jean de, 149
Dresden, "Meyer-Madonna" at, 108-13
DÜrer, Albrecht, 22
Edward VI., King, 163, 170
Elizabeth of York, Queen, 161
Erasmus, Desiderius, 17-21, 125, 137, 158
Portraits of, 98, 99, 159
Eyck, H. and J. van, 15, 185
FÄsch, Remigius, 111
Fisher, John, Bishop of Rochester, 118
"Fountain of Life," painting, 53, 54
Froben, Hieronymus, 158
Froben, Johann, 15, 34, 35, 63, 64, 68, 98
Gardiner, Stephen, Bishop of Winchester, 175
Gerster, Hans, 89, 90
Glass-painting, designs for, 54, 55
"Goddess of Love," painting, 104
Gold-work, designs for, 163
Graf, Urs, 65, 66
Guildford, Sir Henry, 119-21
Lady, 121
Gyze, Georg, 142-43
Hayes, Cornelius, 170
Henry VII., King, portrait, 161
Henry VIII., King, portrait, 160-63, 195
New Year present to Holbein, 170
Henry, Prince of Wales, 151
Hertenstein, Jacob von, 43
Holbein, Ambrose, 10, 12, 13, 17
Bruno, 12
Elsbeth, 58, 94-7, 104, 105, 107, 126-9, 177-82
Hans, the Elder, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16, 91
the Younger, birth (1497), 16
at Basel (1515-17), 24
at Lucerne (1517-18), 41, 42
a citizen of Basel (1519-26), 58-113
marriage, 58
wife and children, 104-7, 124, 129-31, 169, 170, 182
first visit to England (1526-8), 115-25
last years in Basel (1528-31), 125-36
purchase of Basel House (1528), 125, 126
final return to London (1531), 136
mention of, by Nicholas Bourbon, 157
official income, 167
will and death, 180-83
place of interment, 184
illegitimate children, 183
as a designer and engraver, 35-7
greatness of, 184-7
religious ideals and sympathies, 21-4, 77-83
Jacob, 128-30
Katharina, 128-31
KÜnegoldt, wife of Andreas Syff, 129-31
Michael, 11
Philip, son of Hans the Younger, 86, 94, 129, 169, 170
Philip, grandson of Hans the Younger, 130
Sigmund, 12, 177
Howard, Catherine, Queen, 175
Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, 175
Hutten, Ulrich von, 71
Hyss, Cornelius, 157
"Jane Seymour Cup," 163
Kratzer, Nicholas, 121, 122, 157
LaÏs Corinthiaca, painting, 105, 106
Landsknechte, drawings, 57, 58
"Last Supper," paintings, 50-52
Leemput, Remi von, 160
Leonardo da Vinci, 40, 50
Lisbon, painting, the "Fountain of Life" at, 53, 54
Lucerne, 41, 42
LÜtzelburger, Hans, 36, 98
Lystrius, Gerard, 68
Mantegna, Andrea, 40, 41, 50
"Mary Magdalen at the Sepulchre," painting, 80-83
Merian, family of, at Frankfurt, 131
Meyer, Anna, 110, 111
Dorothea, nÉe Kannegiesser, 31-4, 109
Jacob zum Hasen, 31-4, 75, 89, 107
Jacob zum Hirten, 132, 133
Magdalena, nÉe BÄr, 31
"Meyer-Madonna" (Darmstadt and Dresden), 108-13
Milan, 40
Monasticism and Art, 5-8
More, Sir Thomas, 112, 114-17, 137
Morett, Hubert, or Morette, Charles de Solier, portrait, 144, 154, 194
"Nativity," paintings, 71-4
Oberriedt, Hans, 72, 75
Oporinus, Joannes, 67, 68
Paracelsus, 67
Parr, Catherine, 176, 179
Passion, eight-panelled altar-piece, 75-77
drawings, 77, 78
Plague (in 1543), 182
Saint Andrew Undershaft, London, 178, 183, 184
Saint Catharine Cree, London, 184
Schmidt, Franz, 177, 182
Schoolmaster's Sign-board, paintings, 25, 26
Selve, Georges de, Bishop of Lavaur, 149
Seymour, Jane, Queen, 157, 158, 161, 163, 164
"Sheba, Queen of, visiting Solomon," drawing, 155
Solier, Charles de, Seigneur de Morette, 154
Solothurn Madonna, painting and its history, 86-97
Steelyard, the, London, 138-42
Stokesley, John, Bishop of London, 119
Sultz, Dorothea von, nÉe Offenburg, 104-6
Title-pages, woodcuts, 65, 98, 115, 159
"Triumph of Riches and of Poverty," drawings, 150
Tuke, Sir Bryan, 122, 123
Ulm, 11
Utopia, woodcut title-page, 115
"Virgin and Child," drawings, 55
paintings by Holbein, 86-97, 108-13
Warham, William, Archbishop of Canterbury, 118, 119, 137
Wilhelm Meister, School of, 8
Windsor, portrait, drawings at, 117
Zetter, "Madonna" at Solothurn, 86-97
LITTLE BOOKS ON ART
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SUBJECTS
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JEWELLERY. C. Davenport
CHRIST IN ART. Mrs. H. Jenner
OUR LADY IN ART. Mrs. H. Jenner
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ARTISTS
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RAPHAEL. A. R. Dryhurst
PLYMOUTH
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PRINTERS
| TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE Contemporary spellings have generally been retained even when inconsistent. A small number of obvious typographical errors have been corrected and some names regularised; missing punctuation has been silently added. Advertising material has been moved to the end. The following additional changes have been made; they can be identified in the body of the text by a grey dotted underline: | |
| to away with him | to do away with him |
| and in Pope Leo's hands for a year yet | and would remain in Pope Leo's hands for a year yet |
| Die zetter'schen Madonna vow Solothurn | Die Zetter'sche Madonna von Solothurn |
| and that I imagine it to have | and that I imagine to have |
| MecÆnas | MÆcenas |
| at Basel (1515-77) | at Basel (1515-17) |
