Part 2

Basle was still torn by religious dissensions, but the party of the Reformation now held the upper hand. A furious outbreak in 1529 led to the further destruction of religious paintings and sculpture. Even Holbein did not escape at least minor persecution for his religious principles. On June 18, 1530, he was, in conjunction with a number of his fellow-citizens, called upon to explain why he had not taken part in the communion service instituted by the Basle Church after the abolition of the Catholic creed in the previous year. He cautiously replied that before approaching the Lord’s Table he desired the signification of the holy mystery to be more clearly explained to him; and this seems to have been done, as he did not persist in his refusal. Beyond the Town Hall decorations he does not seem to have found much profitable work to do. He painted a portrait of his wife and two children (Basle Museum) and a new portrait of _Erasmus_ in 1530, the small round one now at Basle, the original source of a number of copies at Parma, Turin, and elsewhere. There was little opportunity, however, for him to follow his art with adequate success, and his thoughts naturally turned once more towards England. He came back to this country in 1532, probably without informing the Basle authorities of his intention. They sent a very flattering letter after him, offering him a fixed salary if he would return, but he does not appear to have taken any immediate notice of this suggestion.

SECOND RESIDENCE IN ENGLAND.

During Holbein’s absence Sir Thomas More had become Lord Chancellor, but this office he relinquished in May, 1532, and was gradually falling out of favour with the King. Holbein did not take up his residence in Chelsea again, but settled in London, near the large colony of German and Netherlandish merchants then forming an important part of the commercial life of the capital. These merchants of the Hanseatic League formed a close corporation among themselves, and in their midst Holbein now made his home. Their place of meeting was called the Steelyard, and here their warehouses and residences were grouped round the hall of the guild, with its trim garden and special wineshop. Among them the artist found not only the language and habits of his own country, but also plenty of well-paid employment.

During 1532 and 1533, and occasionally later, he painted a number of his compatriots seated in their offices and engaged in the ordinary routine of business life, including the superb picture of _Georg Gisze_ (Berlin, _see illustration, and p. 51_), _Hans of Antwerp_, the goldsmith, later on one of Holbein’s executors (Windsor), _Derich Born_ (Windsor and Munich), _Derich Berck_ (Petworth), _Geryck Tybis_ (Vienna), _Ambrose Fallen_ (Brunswick), and several others whose names have not been discovered. He was also employed by the members of the Steelyard as a corporate body. At the coronation of Anne Boleyn, in May, 1533, the streets of London were gaily decorated by the various city companies and guilds, and the triumphal arch erected by the Hanseatic League was designed by Holbein. Still more important were the two large allegorical paintings in monochrome, _The Triumph of Riches_ and _The Triumph of Poverty_, with which he decorated their banqueting-hall. These fine works have disappeared. Fortunately, they were copied by Zucchero in 1574, and by Jan de Bisschop (British Museum), while the original sketch for _The Triumph of Riches_ is in the Louvre.

Holbein had now reached the highest point of his career, and the series of brilliant portraits he produced during the last ten years of his life is unrivalled. It was probably owing to his connection with the Steelyard that he was employed by several foreign Ambassadors, who were accredited to England during his second residence here. Many of these German merchants were more than mere traders. Owing to their knowledge of foreign languages, and their business relations with all parts of the world, they were often employed by the Government, and occasionally sent on important missions abroad. In this way they were personally known to many of the Ambassadors to England.

In 1533 Holbein produced his most important work still in this country, the picture familiarly known as _The Ambassadors_ (_see illustration, and p. 47_), representing Jean de Dinteville, French Ambassador at the English Court, and his friend George de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur. Another magnificent portrait of an Ambassador was painted about this time, probably in 1534, the famous one in the Dresden Gallery, for many years said to be a masterpiece of Leonardo da Vinci, and a portrait of Ludovico Sforza, and still called in the Dresden catalogue _Hubert Morett, Goldsmith to Henry VIII_. It really represents _Charles de Solier, Comte de Morette_, who was in England more than once, and succeeded Dinteville as resident Ambassador in 1534. His clients, however, were not only foreigners; he constantly painted Englishmen of all ranks and classes. In 1533 he produced the fine portrait of _Robert Cheseman, of Dormanswell_ (Hague), with his hawk on his wrist, erroneously called _The King’s Falconer_ (_see illustration, and p. 56_), and the equally fine one of a man in black (Berlin), supposed to be a member of the Trelawney family. The latter’s brother he had painted in the previous year (Count Schönborn’s Collection, Vienna). In 1534 we have the portrait of that “hammer of the monks,” Thomas Cromwell, when only Master of the Jewel House.

It is not until 1536 that we get any actual proof that Holbein was in the King’s service. In that year he painted the new Queen, Jane Seymour (Vienna and Woburn Abbey). It seems certain, however, that Henry must have been well aware of his artistic capacity before this date. A number of artists, both foreign and native, all greatly inferior to Holbein, were then employed by the King, and professional jealousy may have had some share in retarding his entry into the royal service. During Holbein’s first visit to England John Browne was sergeant-painter to the King, holding the office for more than twenty years. He was succeeded by another Englishman, Andrew Wright, who in his turn was followed by an Italian, Antonio Toto; but, next to Holbein, the leading painter in England, and a man of real ability, was Lucas Horembault, or Hornebolt, of Ghent, who had settled here with his father Gerard and his sister Susannah, both of them artists. The salary that Hornebolt received from the King was always larger than that paid to Holbein.

In 1537 Holbein painted a great picture on the wall of the Privy Chamber at Whitehall, representing the two Kings, Henry VII. and Henry VIII., and their Queens, Elizabeth of York and Jane Seymour. When the art historian, Van Mander, saw it in 1604, it was still in perfect preservation, and he speaks with the utmost enthusiasm about it. It was destroyed in the fire which burned down that palace in 1698. Happily, there still exists a small copy of it (Hampton Court), which was made in 1667 by Remigius van Leemput by order of Charles II., and Mr. Ernest Law has recently discovered a replica by the same painter; while a still better judgment can be formed of its size, composition, and general effect from Holbein’s cartoon for the left half, showing the King and his father, which belongs to the Duke of Devonshire. It is a black chalk drawing, heightened with Indian ink, and was used for tracing the design upon the wall.

Almost every other portrait of Henry painted after 1537--and there are many of them scattered about England and on the Continent--was based upon the Whitehall likeness. It is very doubtful if even one of them is the genuine work of Holbein’s brush. Such portraits were multiplied to give away to foreign Princes and faithful subjects. The best of them is the well-known full-face representation of the King in Warwick Castle--a life-size work, very admirably painted, most probably by Hornebolt. There is really no authentic portrait of him by Holbein in existence, with the exception of the rough chalk drawing at Munich and the exquisite square portrait at Althorp, which, in the opinion of Mr. Lionel Cust, F.S.A., is a genuine example.

After the death of Jane Seymour, the Privy Council lost no moment in urging the King to marry again. The choice fell upon Christina, daughter of the King of Denmark, and niece of the Emperor Charles V. She was Duchess of Milan, and the young widow of Francesco Sforza, the last Duke of his race. Holbein went over to Brussels in March, 1538, to paint the lady’s portrait, and an account of this expedition will be found on p. 54. The very lovely full-length portrait of this Princess belongs to the Duke of Norfolk, who has generously lent it to the National Gallery for a number of years (_see illustration, and p. 55_). This is, perhaps, the most perfect piece of portraiture Holbein ever accomplished, and one of the great pictures of the world.

At this time the artist was receiving a salary of £30 a year from the King in the form of a retaining fee, and he must have obtained further payment for whatever work he did. His money was paid quarterly, but he was occasionally granted a whole year’s salary in advance. In the autumn of the same year, 1538, he made a second journey abroad, to Upper Burgundy, for which he received £10 from the King’s purse, probably to obtain a second sitting from the Duchess. He took this opportunity of paying a flying visit to Basle, no doubt to talk over with the Town Council an offer they had just made him of a pension of fifty gulden, with leave of absence in England for two years longer, if he would then return to his native city and settle there. He remained in Basle for only a few days during December, and was received with enthusiasm by his fellow-citizens. He most probably returned to England by way of Paris, where he stopped to apprentice his eldest son Philip to the goldsmith Jerome David. Whatever agreement he may have made with the Swiss authorities, he did not visit Basle again during the five remaining years of his life. He was back in London on New Year’s Day, 1539, and presented a portrait of the young Prince Edward to the King.

In August, 1539, he was again sent abroad upon a similar mission. He went to Düren, in the Duchy of Cleves, to paint the daughters of the Duke, a Protestant Prince, with whom, since the negotiations with the Emperor for Christina’s hand had come to nothing, Cromwell thought an alliance would be politic. The likeness Holbein made of _Anne of Cleves_, probably the fine one now in the Louvre, is said by tradition to have so flattered the lady that Henry consented to marry her, with the well-known disastrous results.

With the exception of a miniature at Windsor, there is no authentic portrait of _Catherine Howard_, whom the King married as soon as he had divorced the unfortunate Anne; but her uncle, _Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk_, the Lord High Admiral, was painted by him more than once. Holbein had now become the most popular portrait painter of the day, and his commissions were very numerous. It is impossible to give a complete list of them here, but the principal ones will be found in the Appendix.

At Windsor Castle is the magnificent collection of chalk drawings of heads, over eighty in number, which includes portraits of many of the most illustrious people of the day. These were preliminary studies for portraits, and are the finest record we possess of the celebrities of the Tudor period, invaluable both historically and artistically. In them Holbein is seen at his finest as a delineator of character.

In 1542 he began the large painting which was ordered to commemorate the granting of a charter by Henry VIII. to the newly-incorporated Company of Barber Surgeons, which still hangs in the Company’s Hall in London. He did not live to complete it. Some of the heads of the principal physicians he had finished, but the greater part of the picture, including the huge and ugly figure of the King, out of all proportion to the other persons represented, was put in by some other and far inferior hand. At least two of the doctors represented in this work were also painted by him separately, _Dr. John Chambers_ (Vienna) and _Sir William Butts_, as well as the latter’s wife.

Holbein died in the following year, 1543, carried off by the plague, which then raged in London. The exact date of his death is not known, but he made a hasty will on October 7, and on November 29 administration was granted to his old friend Hans of Antwerp, the goldsmith. He was living at the time in the parish of St. Andrew Undershaft, where he was rated as a foreigner. He is supposed to have been buried in the Church of St. Katherine Cree, but no record of this has been discovered. His wife died in 1549. His eldest son Philip, “a good, well-behaved lad,” served his apprenticeship in Paris, and finally settled in Augsburg, founding that branch of the family upon which the Emperor Matthias conferred a patent of nobility as the Holbeins of Holbeinsberg. His second son James died as a goldsmith in London, while his daughters married respectable citizens of Basle.

THE ART OF HOLBEIN

Holbein’s art was many-sided, although, during the latter half of his life, he was occupied chiefly with portraiture. This was not owing to the artist’s preference for this mode of expression, but to the fact that there was very little demand for any other form of painting in England. The painter of _The Meyer Madonna_ was not the man to have abandoned the production of large religious compositions if there had been any adequate demand for them. His few works of this nature which remain place him in the front rank of sixteenth-century artists, and, if he had been born on the south side of the Alps, he would have painted sacred pictures as fine as those of any Italian cinquecentist; even Raphael would have found in him a worthy rival.

It is an immense loss to art that all his large decorative undertakings, and many of his most important pictures, have perished or have been lost, so that to-day we can only judge of them by a few preliminary studies, certain fragments of the originals which have been preserved in museums, and, in a few cases, some early and careful copies of a reduced size. The decorations with which he covered a number of houses in Lucerne and Basle have all disappeared. What the weather did not ruin the clumsy hand of the restorer and street-improver has destroyed. A number of his sacred pictures must have perished during the artist’s lifetime through the fury of iconoclastic mobs. Damp, dirt, and neglect were the cause of the gradual fading away of his wall-paintings in the interior of the Basle Town Hall. His two great allegorical works for the decoration of the dining-hall of the Steelyard--_The Triumph of Riches_ and _The Triumph of Poverty_--have vanished, either destroyed in the Whitehall fire of 1698 or dispersed at the sale of Charles I.’s pictures. Some such fate seems also to have befallen the great portrait group of _Sir Thomas More’s Family_. The great wall-painting in the Privy Chamber in Whitehall was also destroyed by fire. Gone, too, is _The Battle of Spurs_, which, if Mr. Nicholls is right, was painted by our artist. Finally, death cut short the painting of the picture in the Barber Surgeons’ Hall. Such a list of lost or ruined masterpieces is, unhappily, not uncommon in the history of art, but Holbein has suffered more than most men; yet enough remains from his brush to allow us to place him among the greatest men of genius of his own or any succeeding age.

As already stated, he owed little to any other master than his father. It is impossible to say to what extent he assisted the elder painter in the series of sacred pictures now preserved in Augsburg and elsewhere in Germany, although certain critics hold that he took a large share in the production of _The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian_ in Munich. This picture is the elder Holbein’s masterpiece, and in it, more than in any other of his works, he has thrown off the German mediævalism in which he was trained, and has emulated the newer style of the Renaissance, with its fine flowing lines and rounded forms and its exact imitation of Nature. It was to this German painter of repute that Holbein was indebted for almost all the artistic training he received. His painting was not affected to any extent by other artists except, indirectly, by the Italians of the North; but what was talent in the father became genius of the rarest quality in the son.

LARGE DECORATIVE WORKS AND WALL-PAINTINGS.

The practice of decorating both the exterior and the interior of houses with large wall-paintings, so universal throughout Italy in the sixteenth century, was by no means uncommon north of the Alps; but in Germany this class of work was badly paid, and the painter employed made use of much mechanical assistance, and did not lavish too much personal care upon it. No other Northern artist carried out work of this nature with such brilliancy and such success as Holbein. It is probable that the subjects of his wall-paintings were chosen for him by his patrons to suit their own tastes; but his fertility of imagination was so great that his renderings of the selected themes were stamped with his original genius. The designs were not carried out by him in a slipshod manner, without understanding, but were masterpieces of dramatic power and composition, and, no doubt, equally artistic in their colour schemes.

In his decorations for the house of Jacob von Hertenstein, in Lucerne, many of the subjects were taken from ancient times. The façade was covered with scenes from secular history, pageants, and combats of children, in a setting of florid Renaissance architecture, an important feature being a great triumphal procession of Cæsar, in its main lines copied from Mantegna. In the interior the walls of the chapel were covered with religious paintings, and the largest chamber was given up to hunting scenes with landscape backgrounds and a representation of _The Fountain of Youth_, with many humorous details.

There is no doubt that he decorated a number of houses in Basle in a similar manner, though we have records of only one of them; but drawings of several elaborately ornamented façades are preserved in various collections, which show that he was often occupied with this kind of work in his younger days. The most famous of these decorated buildings was, as already stated, known as _The House of the Dance_, from a broad frieze running across the second story, which represented a number of peasants boisterously dancing to the music of the bagpipes. The whole front was embellished with painted Renaissance architecture. The great variety of subjects he included, and the elaborate details, may be studied in a sketch preserved in the Basle Museum.

The subjects chosen for the interior decoration of the Basle Town Hall were also from classical antiquity. Richly ornamented columns divided the walls into a number of spaces, which were filled with paintings representing the vital importance to a community of impartial justice. Holbein’s subjects were _Charondas, the Lawgiver, plunging the Sword into his own Heart_; _Zaleucus ordering his own Right Eye to be torn out instead of his Son’s_; _Curius Dentatus sending back the Ambassadors of the Samnites_; and _Sapor, King of Persia, using the Body of the captured Emperor Valerian as a step from which to mount his Horse_. The smaller panels were single figures, such as _Christ_, _David_, _Justice_, _Wisdom_, and _Moderation_. The remaining wall in the Hall, painted in 1530, was covered with two large Biblical subjects--_Rehoboam dismissing the Messengers of the Israelites with fierce threats_, and _The meeting of Samuel and Saul_, when the Prophet angrily reproves the King for having disobeyed the command of God in sparing the Amalekites. The original sketches for both these compositions still exist, and are sufficient to prove how fine the completed pictures must have been. The vehement gesture of Rehoboam is well conceived, and the composition of the Samuel and Saul is masterly.

The two large allegorical friezes for the banquet-room of the Steelyard merchants in London must have been equally fine. The original sketch for _The Triumph of Riches_ (Louvre) shows how easily the genius of the artist adapted itself to this kind of work. The figures in these two compositions, which were done in _tempera_ on canvas, were life-size. They soon became famous, and in 1574 were copied by Zucchero, who, according to Carl van Mander, declared they were as fine as anything accomplished by Raphael. Such triumphal processions as these were, of course, a favourite method of decoration in his day, of which Mantegna’s _Triumph of Cæsar_ was the most famous. In _The Triumph of Riches_ he depicted Plutus, God of Wealth, seated in a car drawn by four horses, with Fortune in front, her veil flying behind her, scattering gold among the accompanying crowd, which is made up of many men of antiquity famous for their wealth, luxury, or avarice. In _The Triumph of Poverty_ Poverty herself, an ancient and miserable hag, and her comrade, Misfortune, are drawn in a poor barrow by two asses, Stupidity and Inactivity, and two oxen, Negligence and Sloth. The vehicle is driven by Hope, who is accompanied by Industry, Memory, and Experience, who distribute axe or hammer, spade or flail, symbols of work, among the poverty-stricken people who crowd round.

In all these large decorative works Holbein displayed the greatest fertility of invention, and a power of composition of a very high order. The sense of life and movement in all the figures, and the appropriateness of the gestures, are alike admirable. In some of his wall-paintings he showed a keen sense of humour; and that joy of life, as felt by the Teuton of his day in his moments of relaxation and merriment, is admirably expressed. There is, too, an exuberance of invention in the architectural and ornamental details which is one of the most striking features of this side of his art, showing how quickly and completely he had made the new ideas of the Renaissance his own.

RELIGIOUS PAINTINGS.

Holbein’s religious pictures almost all date from the earlier part of his career, and few remain which are works of his maturity. More than one of them perished, there is little doubt, during the stormy days of the Reformation in Basle. His earliest known picture is a small panel of _The Virgin and Child_, dated 1514, a work of great promise for a youth of seventeen. It displays a real, though naïve, charm, and the tender attitude with which the Virgin holds the Child is very attractive. She is dressed in white, with a black cloak, and her long, fair hair falls over her shoulders, and Holbein seems to have taken an especial delight in the careful painting of it. This little work, tentative as it is in many ways, gives signs that the hand which painted it was soon to become that of a master. Other early works of a similar character are _The Virgin Mary_ and _St. John the Evangelist_, quarter lengths, seen against a blue background, which remained the artist’s favourite setting for his heads throughout his life. The series of five pictures on canvas, taken from _The Passion of Christ_, need not detain us. It is probable that they were hastily painted for some church decoration or religious celebration. Among the numerous designs for glass-painting which he made in Basle, the most important is a series of ten designs illustrating _The Passion of Christ_, each one set in a background of elaborate architectural structure. The scenes are simply treated, but with great dramatic power, if not with great depth of feeling. The action in most of them is finely conceived, and many of the figures have both dignity and beauty.