Holbein

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 which coming generations would judge him, the resolve to try again if he and Elsbeth might not manage to live in peace under one roof where the children, who were strangers to him, should come to know and be known by him in something more than name, were all relinquished. They must certainly have been relinquished on some definite mutual understanding, and at a "compensation" agreed upon between him and Elsbeth and his step-son, Franz Schmidt; because it must have been Holbein himself who enabled Franz, acting on his mother's behalf, to take over as he did the entire legacy—a snug little competency in itself—to which Holbein fell heir in this autumn by the bequest of his uncle, Sigmund Holbein, citizen of Berne. Philip having been launched by his father in the goldsmith's craft, there only remained the second son and two daughters at home. Thus so far as mere money went, Holbein might now think himself discharged from the support of his family, and free to divert his future earnings from them. And, as has been said, the Will and Inventory proved at Elsbeth's death, six years after her husband's, that he had made no bad provision for them in the matter of material comforts, however remiss his conduct in its moral aspects.

The Royal Accounts break off in 1541, but the Subsidy Roll for the City of London has a very precious item for Holbein's biography in the October of this year. This announces that "Hanns Holbene" is among the "straungers" then residing in "the Parisshe of Saint Andrew Undershafte," and that he is assessed as such.

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 said with awe, "a strange thing in his courage!" The guilty woman had her own tears to shed in expiation; but in the dawn of February 12th, 1542, she walked to the block as full of wilful, cheerful audacity, and as careful of her toilet, as she had ever gone to meet her royal lover. And so the auburn head of the King's fifth wife rolled from the axe that had severed her guilty cousin's.

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 mention has been made. This is the oil portrait of Dr. Chamber, the King's physician, now in the Vienna Gallery (Plate 38). The sitter was, as the inscription shows, eighty-eight years old; and the strong, stern face is full of that "inward" look which comes to the faces of men whose meat and drink has been a lifetime of heavy responsibilities. He had been associated with the Charter of the College of Physicians in 1518, and was also instrumental in that of the Guild of "Barbers and Surgeons," in 1541. And it was probably through him and Dr. Butts, another physician to the King whom Holbein had painted and who was likewise a Master of the new Guild, that he undertook to paint a large work for their hall—Henry VIII. granting their Charter to the Master-Surgeons kneeling before him.

However this may be, with the autumn of 1543 Holbein's life came to a sudden close. Van Mander, wrong as to the date by eleven years which have fathered a host of spurious Holbeins on the Histories of Art, is apparently right as to the cause of death—"the Plague." By the great discovery of Hans Holbein's Will, found by Mr. Black in 1861 among the archives of St. Paul's Cathedral, it is proved that the painter made his Will on October 7th, and must have died between this and November 29th, 1543, when administration was granted to one of his executors (the other would seem to have perished, meanwhile, from the same epidemic). This surviving executor was an old friend of the artist, whose portrait, in the Windsor Gallery, he had painted eleven years before—Hans of Antwerp, a master-goldsmith of the Steelyard.

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 of these babies is mentioned, it is clear that Holbein relied on the verbal instructions which he had given to his trusted friends and to their complete understanding of all the circumstances as well as of his wishes. He was only concerned, apparently, that such small means as could thus be saved for them should not be permitted to pass to his legal heirs.

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.

Secondly, that if the mother of his two illegitimate children had lived with him in London as his wife, she must have just died—perhaps in childbed, perhaps of the Plague. She is not in any way referred to. And there is something in the very signs of confusion and distress throughout the wording of the Will which seems to exhale a far-away anguish—sudden parting, sad apprehensions, keenest anxiety for "my two chylder which be at nurse." There comes before the eye a picture of the five grave men—Holbein, his two executors, the one a goldsmith, the other an armourer, and his two witnesses, a "merchaunte" and a "paynter"—hurrying along the plague-infected streets to get this document legalised as some protection for two motherless babies, in the event of their father's death. No man knew whose turn would come within the hour.

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."

It would seem probable, then, that the painter was buried in this church rather than in the closely adjoining church of Saint Catharine-Cree to which tradition assigned his body. But the horrors of such an epidemic as that in which the painter was swept suddenly away make it easy to understand how even such a man as he had now become could die unnoticed and be buried in an unrecorded grave. When the Earl of Arundel, a few years later, sought to learn where he might set up a monument to one he so greatly admired, there was only this vague and uncorroborated rumour that the painter was buried in Saint Catharine-Cree. And so no monument was built to mark the spot where Holbein's "measure of sliding sand" had been spilled at last.

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 those portraits by which it is now the fashion to mulct him of his far larger dues.

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, the Duchess of Milan, his brooding wife; dancing children, and dancing Death; Christ on the Cross, Christ in the Grave, Christ Arisen; lambs in the fields, woods and hills, gaping peasants, wild battle;—put them side by side, the poor ghosts of them left to us, and compute the range of art—"the majestic range" that framed them all.

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 shimmer of a breaking bubble, the wrinkles in a baby's foot, the beauty of life, the pathos of life, the irony and the lust of life,—he has painted them all, as he saw them all, in the phantasmagoric Procession of Being betwixt garret and throne.

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—

FOOTNOTES.

1: The name used thus, without further identification, is to be taken throughout these pages to mean Hans Holbein the Younger.

2: Variously written Meyer, Meier, Mejer, Meiger, or Megger. Bär is also written Ber, or Berin.

3: I am deeply indebted to the personal kindness and trouble of Sir Martin Gosselin, K.C.M.G., British Minister at the Court of Portugal, for greatly facilitating my own study of this interesting picture.

4: I am indebted to the personal kindness of the discoverer's son, Herr Direktor Zetter-Collin of the Solothurn Museum, for these details. But the whole story, as well as Herr Zetter-Collin's contributions to the history of the work, should be read in his own absorbingly interesting monograph:—"Die Zetter'sche Madonna von Solothurn. (…) Ihre Geschichte, etc." 1902.

5: "Die Liebe zu Gott Heist charite.
Wer Liebe hat der Tragt kein Hass."

A CATALOGUE OF THE PRINCIPAL
EXISTING WORKS OF
HANS HOLBEIN THE YOUNGER

V.

LAST PERIOD; LONDON
(1531-43)

REFERENCES

INDEX