Louise Imogen Guiney

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THE New Gallery on Regent Street, filled, at this time last year, with the memories of the Stuarts and with the graded grace of Vandyke and Lely, has taken a step backward into history to show us a hardier and less enchanting society. The luckless, weak, romantic race are everlastingly dear, as Chopin cleverly said of his own music, to "the cognoscenti and the poets." But this present plunge into the sixteenth century is excellent cold water. The Stuarts are myths to these hard facts of Tudors, these strong-minded and dominant familiars, who destroyed, annexed, altered, and were deposed from nothing except from the Lord Pope's opinion of some of them. Everything here is wide-awake, matter-of-course, bracing: the spectator's mind tempers itself to the indicative present of Queen Bess, and

"to trampling horses' feet,
More oft than to a chamber melody."

The men and women on the walls are neither sophisticated nor complex. They are vehement in oath as in compliment, and hit at Fate straight from the shoulder. The best among them has a certain fierce zest of habit. Sidney and Sir Thomas More, each in his stainless soul, would have put the other in the pillory for blunders of piety. And such characters, with their stormy circumstance, their distinct homogeneous look and mien, get to be fully understood. Nobody pretends to know the involutions of James the Second; but bluff Hal is no riddle. Wolsey and Drake, Archbishop Parker and Anne Boleyn, even Shakespeare, are more comprehensible units than, say, Dr. Donne, or the Duke of Monmouth. They stand in the red morning light, tangible as trees. They are the bread-and-cheese realities who have made English literature, English policy and manners, English religion. The heartbreak for Essex; that other heartbreak for Calais; Wyatt's succoring cat; Raleigh's cloak in the mud; Sidney's cup or water;—

"Battle nor song can from oblivion save,
But Fame upon a white deed loves to build:
From out that cup of water Sidney gave,
Not one drop has been spilled!"

Christina of Milan's reply to her suitor, the asking and axeing monarch: "Had I a second head in reserve, sire, I might dare to become your wife;"—all these are nursery tales, the very fibre of our earliest memory, as of our adult speculation. Old friends, these painted folk! You look at them on canvases which Evelyn admired at Weybridge; which Pepys longed to buy; to which Horace Walpole provided a date and a name; which brushed Ben Jonson and Carew passing towards the masques of Whitehall; which have seen change and the shadow of change, and are themselves ever richer for the remembered eyes which have looked up at them, during three hundred years.

As you glance from the entrance of the New Gallery, this London January of 1890, the first thing to take the eye is a loan from Hampton Court, the full-length of the pioneer poet, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey: a young powerful figure all in red, poised on a hill-top above a vexed white-and-blue sky. He steps forward there, as if in dramatic confirmation of the little known of his proud, obstinate, disinterested career, straight through love, scholarship, adventure, to the Tower axe. One can hardly look at this stripling, with his jewelled cap's white blown feather, and hands laid airily but meaningly on hip and hilt, without remembering the most jocose and off-hand of his verses, written in the spring:

"When I felt the air so pleasant round about,
Lord! to myself how glad I was that I had gotten out."

This is No. 73, the authorship of it hanging undetermined between Holbein and Gwillim Stretes. No. 51, a famous and much-reproduced portrait of Surrey under an archway, is certainly Stretes'; but you covet this other for "Hans the Younger." Its vistas are not uncharacteristic of him; and what a daring bugle-blast of color it is! Masterfully does it light the room, and call you into the Tudor company, and make you glad, likewise, that you have "gotten out." It is great so to find a certain Howard, which is a possible Holbein, the key-note of this exhibition. And the race crops out on the walls every here and there, making trouble in your thoughts, as once in thoughts long quieted. They are shown thus contemporaneously, from "Jocky of Norfolk" to the Philip who died for conscience' sake in the Beauchamp Tower; and wherever they are, there is a free wind, a rebel sunshine. Roam about a little; and you return with gratification to these lean, tense, greyhound personalities. The visitor wearies of the Fidei Defensor, the much-connected-by-marriage, and of the kinsmen and servants, the Brandons and Cromwells, who flatter him by fat approximate resemblance, and of the same dimly-recurrent aspect in the timid burgess noblewomen of the hour; so that his first and last impressions are fain to spring from the spectacle of these firm-chinned soldierly Howards, thin and bright as their own swords, with the conscious look of gentlemen among cads. From the dazzle of history it is a bit difficult, at first, to turn the inward eye upon art alone. But it is Hans Holbein whom we have really come to see. And he is here in his plenary pomp: in chalk drawings, miniatures in hone-stone, burnt wood, and enamel, and in easel-pictures of every sort.

No. 42, in the West Gallery, is an immense cartoon with outlines pricked, made for a fresco in the old Whitehall, comprising a life-sized group of the two Henries and their respective queens, the estate of only one of whom, had, as the modern world knows, finality. It dates from the twenty-seventh year of the reign of Henry the Eighth. His admirable housekeeper of a father, long dead, is, as in Lord Braye's comely picture (No. 33), a white-haired, mild, austerely gracious presence, at physical variance, at every point, from his burly heir. The latter stands À califourchon, well to the front, his arms akimbo: a figure familiar to us as the alphabet, and with the force and value of spoken truth. There are many authentic Holbein portraits of the King in this collection, and their unanimity is without parallel. In the masterpiece labelled No. 126, Waagen "finds a brutal egotism, an obstinacy and a harshness of feeling such as I have never yet seen in any human countenance. In the eyes, too, there is the suspicious watchfulness of a wild beast; so that I became quite uncomfortable from looking at it." Holbein's greedy instinct for form wreaks itself on Henry's characteristic contours: everywhere you recognize the puffy flesh, the full jaw and beady eyes, the level close-shaven head; and, more than all, the round, protuberant, malformed chin, like an onion set in the thin growth of carroty beard. Other artists slur over that ugly little chin, but not the man from Augsburg. Hardly do the elaborations of embroidered doublets and jewelled surcoats with barrel sleeves, laughably misplaced on this hogshead Majesty, give the great court-painter such easy pleasure in the handling. Yet as Vandyke,

"Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy,"

is prone to temper the commonplace to his chivalrous ideals; as Sir Joshua "sees partially, slightly, tenderly, catches the flying lights of things, the momentary glooms, paints also partially, tenderly, never with half his strength,"—so here is one too much bent on his accuracy and his reporter's conscience. Nobody who has seen these thirty or more versions of the hero of matrimony according to Holbein, will ever forget his power in clinching an impression. High, low, east, west, straddles the royal Harry: a magnificent piece of pork, arrayed like Solomon in all his glory. There is no contradiction from first to last; the testimony is not patched. No historiographer, in face of them, has any option to think of Henry but as Holbein's brush thought of him. Mr. Froude is hereby checkmated: his idol crumbles. The perfectly square florid countenance, the little crowded features, the indomitable leer under the flat hat and feather, the expanding velvets, the sturdy calves of which their owner was vain, the whole air of an aggressive and successful personality,—these are your statistics, "State papers," as Hazlitt once happily called them. They do not allege; they convict. This, they seem to say, is he who celebrated his wedding on his old love's burial-day, who sacrificed the truest liegemen in his islands, and who made war on the architecture of monastic England in a maintained fit of crazy and vulgar spite. The ornate No. 55 is also a terrific "human document." Yet the special plea, for all that, is not fair; it is only as fair as Holbein can make it. He had not the centrifugal mind. To look before and after is not his wont. The royal sitter is impeached unjustly.

"Tell Isabel the Queen I looked not thus,
When for her sake I ran at tilt in France."

Was this the mirror of chivalry in his youth? the handsome Henry of joust and debate, who walked by choice with thinking men, in an atmosphere of Christian statecraft and the fine arts? he who wrote devotional essays, and composed winning music? If so, that Henry has no survival here. Something of him must have lingered about the later aspect of the tyrant King, as good is sure to do wherever its shrine has been; but Holbein failed (for we cannot think he refused) to bear it witness.

It is pleasant to find Holbein himself looking from No. 52: a noble portrait, in distemper, from his own hand, in his prime. It makes one revert, however, to the prior Holbein, also done by himself, now in the Museum at Basle: a sweet sketch, which, judged by the face alone, could instantly be relegated to the era where it belongs, that of the dawn of humanism. There, the straight hair has yet a soft ring or two over the brow; the mouth is sensitive, but ironic; the young neck full of power; the eyebrows diversely arched, as if in a passing press of thought; the whole mien already suggests, as Woltman says, "seriousness and mental superiority." This picture before us is very splendid, but it is not so reassuring. Holbein's body-color at Berlin, of the chunk-headed, thick-bearded, small-eyed Englishman,—a miracle of a drawing,—may be accepted as the crass original John Bull. With all manner of exception in favor of the painter, Holbein was rather that sort of a man. His work had the warrant of his genius: what he saw was what his whole habit fitted him to see. Each century has its own casts of physiognomy, greatly accentuated once by the passive individuality, now, alas, vanished, of costume. There seem to have been, in Holbein's day, but two physical values: the grave, alert, "sunnily-ascetic" men, who were dissatisfied with the time; and the able bold time-servers, who kept their flesh upon them, and their peace. Henry himself, at his best, was the second type, as Erasmus was the first. It is with a sigh of relief that one turns from the imperious presence which chases you through the West Gallery, and "lards the lean earth as he walks along," to confront, in another room, the memorials of his little son.

Of these, there are some sixteen portraits, exclusive of the drawings, and five of them are from Holbein's hand. The half-length lent by the Earl of Yarborough, No. 174, shows a charming child with a great hat tied under his chin; No. 182, Lord Petre's, is a spirited bust on a misty green ground; in No. 190, a gem of the first water, belonging to the Earl of Denbigh's collection, the Prince stands, lovely as a lily, habited in white and cloth-of-gold, with a long fur-lined crimson surcoat, his slender beautifully-modelled hand closed on a dagger. The family beauty begins and ends with Edward, in his grave at sixteen; there is no Edward, by Holbein, older than six. As usual, the master draws you from his own art to the root of the thing before you, even as he drew Ruskin from counting his skeleton's clacking ribs in the Dance of Death: and forthwith you begin speculating on the moral qualities of the royal bud, "the boy-patron of boys." There is no denying that he looks like Another. Yes, he is very Henry-the-Eighthy! when you study him at short range. And he had a unique talent, you suddenly remember, for signing the death-warrants of uncles. Princess Mary, from the same hand, is decorously dressed; she has flat hair and brown eyes. Acid and dismal as she is, you would say at once of her, that she is sincere,—sine cera, without wax. She also resembles a parent: but it is Katharine of Aragon. No. 94 (one mentally thanks Mr. Huth for a sight of it in the original!) is the warmest thing in the room: the famous portrait of Sir Thomas More. The nap of his claret velvet sleeves appears never to have lost a particle of its lustre. One knows not which to admire the most in this picture: the breadth of composition, the precision and sweep of line, or the spiritual dignity and repose. Its mate, the half-length of Sir John More, the father, Senior Judge of the King's Bench, "homo civilis, suavis, innocens," is very nearly as superb, though it has less body. Both were done by Holbein during his happy stay at Chelsea. His presentation of More is always inestimable: you recognize, by some little accent ever and anon, that he painted him with enjoyment and understanding love. "Thy painter, dearest Erasmus," wrote More, "is an amazing artist." It was on a hint of the Earl of Arundel that Holbein went to England. When asked there who had persuaded him to cross the Channel, he could not remember the nobleman's name, though he remembered his face: one turn of the pen, and the answer was apparent. But it was Erasmus who gave him his letters of introduction, who was in reality his patron; for Erasmus sent him to More, and from the Chancellor's roof he passed to that of the King, at an honorarium of three hundred pounds a year. And as he painted these friends, so he painted their colleagues: with sympathy and authority. Our most intimate knowledge of the finer spirits among the publicists of the sixteenth century comes from Holbein's canvas. We cannot fail to observe "the weight of thought and care in these studious heads of the Reformation." Such a weight is in every Holbein of Colet and Warham and More, of Melanchthon, Froben, Erasmus himself, (borne in him, as in More, with an almost whimsical sweetness), and of "the thoroughly Erasmic being," Bonifacius Amerbach. Looking at them, and mindful of their diverse sagacities, one must corroborate the celebrated wish of Goethe that the business of the Reformation, spoiled, as a work of art, by Luther and Calvin, and as a theological issue, by the popular interference, had been left to the trained leaders: to men like these in one generation, and to men like Pole and Hugo Grotius in the next!

Wolsey and the great and quietly-handled Archbishop Warham hang here together in strange posthumous amity, parted only by the panel of Anne, Bluebeard's fourth Queen, which Holbein went to Cleves to paint. A very undistinguished person No. 108 must have been, quite worthy of her safe suburban pensioner's life, and the humorous commuting title of the King's Sister. All her forerunners and successors are here to the life, limned by Holbein's brush and pencil. The dearth of female beauty, from 1509 to 1547, was truly extraordinary, if we are to believe the believable pigments before us. The women of the court have the fullest possible representation, with the adjunct of exceptionally picturesque, though stiff, attire. But among them all, it would be a hard task to bestow the apple upon the belle, for a reason quite other than any known to Paris on Ida. Even Anne Boleyn, full-lipped and gay, has but an upper-housemaid prettiness. It is small compensation that most of them were learned. The best female portrait, admirably hung, is No. 92: the young Duchess of Milan, in Holbein's latest and largest manner. The demure girl, set in novel blacks and whites of her widow's mourning, posed with consummate simplicity, has always an admiring crowd in front of her. Wornum's critical last word echoes: it is "a stupendous picture." But the Duchess might be Lancelot Gobbo's sweetheart, so far as the actual bearing and expression are concerned. No wonder that the fright Gloriana passed for all that was comely and thoroughbred! Could it be that her subjects had no loftier criterion in the memory of their own mothers?

The fine flower of the picture department of the Tudor Exhibition is the Queen's loan from Windsor Library: eighty-nine drawings on tinted paper, ranged on the screens of the West and South Galleries. Queen Caroline, in George the Second's time, found them in a Kensington Palace cupboard, and had them framed. (We know nothing else so nice of that bore of a martyr.) Behold Holbein's methods running free! In decisive and rapid chalk lines, with a mere suggestion of color, or a touch, here and there, of India ink, he gives us his English contemporaries: some in playful perfection commended to posterity, as a matter of a dozen conscientious touches. How he delights in a hollow cheek, a short silken beard, an outstanding ear, or the hair sprouting oddly on the temples! Despite his uncompromising truth of locality, the result is often of astounding delicacy: notably in the heads of Lords Clinton and Vaux, and that of Prince Edward. Most of these Windsor sheets are studies for pictures; and thus we have Holbein's splendid roll of familiar faces over again; but that of Sir John Godsalve is complete, and in body-colors, of grand breadth and tone. The catalogue names were affixed much later, and are not perfectly trustworthy: but those indicated as Sir Harry Guilford, the Russells, Earls of Bedford, the Howards, Lord Wentworth, Sir Thomas Eliott, and John Poins (the latter overbrimming with individual force), lead in interest and technique. No. 514, the scholarly and lovable Eliott, is perhaps the thing one would choose, of all here, to win Holbein the admiration of those who have yet to appreciate him. Its refined finish and bold conception are in unique balance. Sir Thomas Eliott, in half profile, is grave and plain. But whoever likes to pay homage to intelligent human goodness, will delight in this report of him. You feel that Rembrandt would have turned from his cloudless, treeless table-land of a countenance; and that such as Sir Peter Lely would have found him cryptic enough, and so smothered him in ultramarine draperies. But among Holbein's men, after the JÖrg Gyze (1532) in the Museum at Berlin, the Hubert Morett in the Dresden Gallery (1537), and the Young Man with a Falcon (1542) in the Gallery of the Hague, after his immortal major achievements, in short, one might rank this little unshaded frost-fine drawing of Sir Thomas Eliott, a sitter placed forever on this side of death.

But the ladies, again, in their close bodices and triangular head-dresses, generally come off second-best. Holbein's elemental candor befitted them not. Failing to be themselves in full, they are more or less Elisabeth-Schmiddy! tinctured with reminiscences of the artist's muddy-tempered Hausfrau at home in Basle. The one quality they cannot convey is breeding, social distinction. Holbein's woman may have youth, goodness, capacity, even authority; but

"Was the lady such a lady?"

You miss the aroma of manners. The mystery of sex is absent, too: a thing the Florentines never missed, and which Gainsborough and Romney found it impossible not to convey. When you see Holbein's men, you wish you had known them; but his women merely remind you that he was a very great painter. It is well to remember, nevertheless, that he had no very great woman to paint: no such patroness, for instance, as "Anne, Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery." His organ-hand does what it can for souls frangible as lutes. Wherever there is sincerity, kindness, or a brave soul, wherever there is sagacity or thought in these Tudor faces, their delineator makes it tell. Did the she-visionaries, if there were any rich enough to engage Holbein, did the persons born in Hawthorne's "brown twilight atmosphere," habitually avoid his studio? No kirtled aristocracy of any age or country was ever so flat and dozy. Surrey occupied himself in scorning "the new men" of his day; and it is conceivable that new men abounded, to fill the places depopulated by the Wars of the Roses, when all that was gallant and significant in the upper ranks, seemed, in one way or another, to have gone under. But the Wars of the Roses touched not the female succession in the ducal and baronial houses: and the wonder remains that Honthorst and Vandyke just after Holbein, and Jan de Mabuse just before him, could have found, among English maids and wives, the lofty graces which he never saw. Exceptions might be made, however, in favor of Elizabeth, Lady Rich; for "high-erected thought" is bodily manifest in her, as in the dark-eyed Lady Lister, and in Lady Surrey, a sweet patient good woman who had known tears. Lady Butts is pleasingly modern. At what four-to-six has one met her? All the ladies of the More family are alluring acquaintances; and no one is to be envied who does not declare for Lady Richmond, with her absurd cap and feather, the big water-drop-shaped pearls in her ears, the downcast lids, and that delicious, kissable, cheerful mouth!

Our famous old friend, the great sovereign who saw fit to box the ears of offending gentlemen, and make war upon their wives, possesses the North Gallery. Pale, beaked, sinister; amiably shrewd, like Becky Sharp; now as a priggish infant with a huge watery head, anon as a parrot-like old woman; here with dogs frisking about her, and there with a grimace which would scatter a pack of dogs to the four winds; always swathed in inexpressible finery, Elizabetha Dei Gratia Regina arises on the awed spectator's eye. Her vanities were fairly inherited from her straddling sire. Any authentic portrait of her is a mass of fluff and sparkle, an elaborate cobweb several feet square, in which, after much search and many barricades of haberdashery surmounted, you shall light upon the spectral spider who inhabits them. There is nothing much more entertaining in this world than a study of the royal and virginal wardrobe. Those were epic clothes! They defy analysis, from the geyser of lace circling the neck and ears in a dozen cross-currents, to the acute angles of the diamonded, rubied stomacher, and the stiff acre of petticoat. They brought employment and money to artists, who painted in the significant occupant as they could, and they serve to illustrate for ever the science of dress-making, whose heraldic shield should bear Eve couchant on one side, and Elizabeth rampant on the other. In the balcony above is No. 484, an appalling picture of Her Majesty, in a ruff like isinglass. When we recall that, grown old, she had all her mirrors broken, and all paintings of herself which were not liars destroyed, what must have been the terrors of that countenance for which such a copy as this proved sufficiently flattering! Despite Zucchero, Hilliard, and Pourbus, he is the wisest man alive who knows how that illustrious lady really looked. And as you glance about, be it on the first visit or the twentieth, full of optical and consequent historical bewilderment; as you see how to right and left of Queen Bess the hosts of that wonderful reign have gathered again, you become keenly aware that one who died in the parish of S. Andrew Undershaft, in 1543, "should have died hereafter." Hunger for that bygone genius is in your thought there: O for an hour of Hans Ho. pinxit!

1890.