Holbein’s last important work, the Barber-Surgeons picture, left unfinished by him—Description of it—Copy of it made for James I—Pepys’ attempt to purchase the original—Holbein’s death from the plague in the autumn of 1543—Discovery of his will—His executor, John of Antwerp, and his witnesses, Anthony Snecher, Olryck Obinger, and Harry Maynert—Old mistake in the date of his death—History of Holbein’s family—Englishmen named Holbein—His imitators—Painters who were working in England at the time of his death and shortly afterwards—Johannes Corvus and Gerlach Fliccius—Guillim Stretes—Hans Eworthe—Thomas and John Bettes—Nicholas Lyzarde—Amberger—Copies of Holbein’s pictures in English collections.

The last important work upon which Holbein was engaged, a work left unfinished owing to his sudden death, was the large picture still hanging in the old hall of the Barber-Surgeons’ Company in Monkwell Street, London (Pl. 54).[701] It was painted to commemorate the unification of the Company of Barbers and the Guild of Surgeons by Act of Parliament in the thirty-second year of Henry’s reign (1540-41), and must have been begun shortly after the passing of the Act. At an earlier period the barbers and the surgeons of London had formed a single company, but in course of time had become separated; and upon their second coming together Holbein was called in to furnish a permanent record of the event. During the progress of the work he painted separate portraits of at least two of the sitters in the big picture—Dr. John Chamber and Sir William Butts—just as he had painted individual likenesses of Sir Thomas and Lady More when engaged upon the big group of the Chancellor’s family.

The truth of Van Mander’s statement that Holbein left this large picture unfinished is apparent after even a cursory examination of it. That writer, who regarded it as an “unusually splendid work,” says:

“According to the feeling of some, Holbein is said not to have completed the piece himself, but that the deficient parts were painted by some one else. Nevertheless, if this be the truth, it must lead to the conclusion that the completer of the work must have understood how to follow Holbein’s manner so judiciously that no painter or artist can from good reasons decide that various hands have been engaged in it.”[702]

The latter part of Van Mander’s statement, however, is far from correct, for the hand of a very inferior craftsman is plainly enough to be discerned over a greater part of the picture. The general arrangement of the kneeling figures in the front rank, and the position assigned to the King, were evidently Holbein’s, who had probably finished the heads, and even the robes, of several of the leading members of the Guild, while the heads of others had possibly been traced on the panel from his own preliminary studies before death cut short his labours. For the rest, the picture appears to have suffered from more than one later attempt to finish it.

The composition consists of nineteen figures. Henry VIII is shown full-length on his throne, which is not placed in the centre of the picture, but somewhat to the spectator’s left. He is crowned and dressed in his full robes of state, holding the sword in his right and the charter in his left hand. He is represented as far larger in size than the other figures kneeling in front of him, something in the manner of earlier days, when the importance of the principal person in a painting was brought home to the spectator by the simple plan of depicting him much bigger than those who surrounded him. This is a trick to which such a master as Holbein would never have descended; indeed, the figure of the King, who stares straight out of the picture with a dull, wooden countenance, without evincing the slightest interest in the ceremony in which he is the chief performer, cannot even have been sketched in by Holbein, and is a stiff and clumsy performance at the best. The head has evidently been copied from one of the numerous likenesses of Henry of the type of the Warwick portrait, without any attempt to alter the position of the face or to connect it with the presentation which is taking place. The position of the head may have been indicated by Holbein on the panel, and Woltmann is probably right in his conjecture that it was his intention to represent him standing on the steps of the throne, and not seated, which would account for the height of the face as it now is above the surrounding figures.[703] On the King’s right hand only three members of the Guild are kneeling—Chamber in the front, with Butts next, and T. Alsop behind him. The three may have been thus placed in the position of honour as the King’s personal physicians. All three wear a furred gown and a doctor’s cap. The head of Chamber is excellent, and appears to be wholly Holbein’s work, with little or no retouching; that of Butts has suffered more severely from incompetent hands, while the Alsop is much weaker. It is in this part of the picture, and in one or two of the heads on the opposite side, that Holbein carried his work almost entirely to completion. Eight men kneel in the front row on the King’s left, headed by T. Vicary, who receives the charter from the royal hand, five of them with beards, and some of them with skull-caps, and wearing more elaborate costumes and gowns than those opposite to them. The second figure, T. Aylif, the Warden, is one of the most effective, the head, though here again retouching is very evident, being perhaps the best of all. The heads of Harman and Monforde are noteworthy among the remainder of the figures, the greater number of which have been so badly repainted that no touch of Holbein’s hand is now visible; though it is possible that in some cases he was responsible for the outline. According to Dr. Woltmann, traces of the pinholes by means of which the transference of Holbein’s original sketches of the heads to the panel was made, can still be seen in several instances. Behind the eight kneeling members of the Company on the spectator’s right there appears an upper row of seven figures, which must have been added at a considerably later date than that of the finishing process given to the picture at some time shortly after Holbein’s death. These later figures are so badly placed that they entirely spoil the composition, and are quite devoid of artistic merit, being the work of a still weaker hand than that of the unknown “finisher.” They evidently formed no part of the original arrangement, but represent later members of the company who wished their portraits to be included. The panel is further marred by the fact that over each sitter, with the exception of five in the last-named row, his name is inscribed in large letters. Another late addition, which also helps to spoil the general effect, is a large white tablet on the wall on the right, which contains a long Latin inscription in prose and verse in praise of the King. Originally this space was occupied by a window, through which could be seen the old tower of the church of St. Bride’s, showing that the ceremony was represented as taking place in the palace of Bridewell. Behind the King hangs a large gold-embroidered curtain, and on either side of it the space is roughly filled in with flowers and fruit representing tapestry. According to Dr. Ganz,[704] it is the same chamber, with the same hangings, probably the throne-room in Whitehall, as in the large picture of the family of Henry VIII at Hampton Court (No. 340 (510)),[705] which has been attributed by some writers to Guillim Stretes; and again, in a portrait of Queen Elizabeth in the possession of the Earl of Buckinghamshire. It is possible that the King may have sat for the picture at Whitehall, and that Holbein made use of the surroundings at his hand, but the view from the window in the copy of the Barber-Surgeons painting, mentioned below, seems to indicate that the room represented was in Bridewell. There is no resemblance between the patterns of the carpets in the two pictures. It is painted on a panel made up of a number of thick, vertical oak boards, and is 10 ft. 3 in. wide by 6 ft. high. In Woltmann’s opinion, “the picture is nothing but a ruin, in which we have to search with difficulty for the traces of Holbein.”[706]

This opinion, and an almost similar one given by Wornum, were regarded by the late Sir Charles Robinson as far too scathing.[707] He considered that Holbein’s hand had worked more or less over every part of the great panel—very elaborately and minutely in some parts and very slightly in others; but that nowhere had the finishing touches and work required to give final truth and perfection of representation been bestowed. He thought that an interval of some twenty or thirty years must have elapsed before the Barber-Surgeons, in an inauspicious moment, determined on the completion of their picture, the superadded work seeming to be that of a somewhat advanced Elizabethan period. It must always be a matter of deep regret that they did not leave it in the state in which it came to them from Holbein’s studio, for it would have been of infinitely greater value than it is now. Finished by him it could not have been less than a masterpiece; but even in its incomplete state it would have been of equal interest as forming an invaluable example of his technique and methods of working.

On the 13th of January 1618 James I wrote from Newmarket to the Company asking that the picture should be lent to him, as he was anxious to have a copy made of it, and promising that this should be done expeditiously, and the original redelivered safely. “We are informed,” he said, “there is a table of Painting in your Hall whereon is the Picture of our Predecessor of famous memorie K. Henry the 8th., together wh diverse of yr Companie, wh being both like him and well done Wee are desirous to have copyd.”[708] Holbein’s name is not mentioned in this letter. The copy then made is in all probability the one now in the possession of the Royal College of Surgeons,[709] which is smaller than the original, and an indifferent version of it, on paper attached to canvas. The figure of Alsop, on the extreme right of the King, is omitted, and in place of the tablet with the inscription, the window with a view of the church tower is shown, proving that even if it is not the copy ordered by James I, it is at least a very early version of the original. It was at one time in the collection of Desenfans, and at his sale in 1786 was purchased by the Surgeons’ Company for fifty guineas. It has been incorrectly described as the original cartoon for the picture, and it has also been said, but this again is wrong, that it belonged at one time to the Barber-Surgeons’ Company, and that when the two branches of the Guild were finally separated in 1745, the College retained the copy or cartoon and the Company kept the picture.[710]

The next reference to the picture occurs in Pepys’ Diary, under the date August 29, 1668. The entry runs: “At noon, comes by appointment Harris to dine with me; and after dinner, he and I to Chirurgeons’ Hall, where they are building it new, very fine; and there to see their theatre, which stood all the fire, and, which was our business, their great picture of Holbein’s, thinking to have bought it, by the help of Mr. Pierce, for a little money. I did think to give 200l. for it, it being said to be worth 1000l.; but it is so spoiled that I have no mind to it, and is not a pleasant though a good picture.” The fire of which Pepys speaks was the great fire of 1666, and the damage to which he refers may have been caused to some extent by the smoke, though it is more probable that the injury he noted was merely that caused by time and restoration. Wornum suggests that it underwent restoration shortly after the Great Fire, and that the tablet with the inscription was then introduced in place of the original window.[711] The entry in the Diary further shows how high a value the Company placed on the picture even in those days, and also that they were prepared to sell it at their own price.[712]

In 1734 the Company commissioned Bernard Baron to engrave the picture for the sum of 150 guineas. The plate, which is a large one, and a fairly accurate transcript of the original, except that it is reversed, was published in 1736. It was dedicated to the Earl of Burlington, with a Latin inscription. In 1856 it was engraved on wood for the Illustrated London News by Henry Linton.[713] In 1895 the Company were again anxious to sell it, and an effort was made to purchase it for the nation, but unfortunately the scheme fell through, possibly because the extravagant price of £15,000 was asked for it.

While still engaged upon this important work, Holbein’s life was cut short by the plague, which raged so severely in London in the summer and autumn of 1543 that hundreds of people died each week from it. According to Hall, “Thys yeare was in London a great death of the Pestilence, and therefore Mighelmas Tearme was adjourned to Saynt Albons”; and Stow repeats this statement almost word for word.[714] Holbein succumbed to it on some date between the 7th of October and 29th of November. This was proved by the discovery of his will in February 1861, by Mr. W. H. Black, F.S.A., who found it in one of the Registers of the Commissary of London, at that time preserved in the Record Room at St. Paul’s Cathedral. It is included in the book called “Beverly,” on folios 116 and 121, that volume covering the period from 1539 to 1548. It runs as follows:

“Holbeine.—In the name of God the father, sonne, and holy gohooste, I, Johñ Holbeine, servaunte to the Kynges Magestye, make this my Testamente and last will, to wyt, that all my goodes shalbe sold and also my horse, and I will that my debtes be payd, to wete, fyrst to Mr. Anthony, the Kynges servaunte, of Grenwiche, ye of [sic] summe of ten poundes thurtene shyllynges and sewyne pence sterlinge. And more over I will that he shalbe contented for all other thynges betwene hym and me. Item, I do owe unto Mr. John of Anwarpe, goldsmythe, sexe poundes sterling, wiche I will also shalbe payd unto hym with the fyrste. Item, I bequeythe for the kynpyng [keeping] of my two Chylder wich be at nurse, for every monethe sewyn shyllynges and sex pence sterlynge. In wytnes, I have sealed and sealed [sic] this my testament the vijth day of Octaber, in the yere of or Lorde God MlvCxliij. Wytnes, Anthoney Snecher, armerer, Mr. Johñ of Anwarpe, goldsmythe before said, Olrycke Obynger, merchaunte, and Harry Maynert, paynter.”

To this the following official act was appended on the 29th November:

“XXIXo die mensis Novembris anno Domini predict. Johannes Anwarpe executor nominat, in testamento sive ultima voluntate Johannis alias Hans Holbein nuper parochie sancti Andree Vndershafte defuncti comparuit coram Magistro Johanne Croke, &c., Commissario generali, ac renunciavit omni executioni hujus modi testamenti, quam renunciationem dominus admisit, deinde commisit administracionem bonorum dicti defuncti prenominato Johanni Anwarpe in forma juris jurato et per ipsum admissa pariter et acceptata. Salvo jure cujuscumque. Dat. etc.”

[On the 29th November in the aforesaid year of our Lord, John Anwarpe, appointed executor in the testament or last will of John alias Hans Holbein, recently deceased in the parish of St. Andrew Undershaft, appeared before Master John Croke, Commissary-General, and renounced the execution of the said will, which renunciation was allowed, and the administration of the property left was consigned to the before-mentioned John Anwarpe as sworn in, which was admitted and accepted by him. The right of each intact.

This is followed on folio 121 of the book by the entry:

“Holbene.—XXIXno die mensis predicti commissa fuit administracio bonorum Johannis alias Hans Holbeñ parochie sancti Andrei Undershaft nuper abintestato defuncti Johanni Anwarpe in forma juris jurato, ac per ipsum admissa pariter et acceptata. Salvo jure cujuscumque. Dicto die, mens, &c.”

[Holbene.—The 29th of the aforesaid month the administration of the property of John alias Hans Holben, recently deceased ab intestato in the parish of St. Andrew Undershaft, was consigned to John Anwarpe as sworn in, and was admitted and accepted by him. The right of each intact. Said day of month, &c.][715]

According to these entries, John of Antwerp was Holbein’s executor, although he is not so mentioned in the will, and on the 29th November he renounced all execution of it, and took out letters of administration only. The will itself appears to have been drawn up carelessly and in haste; probably Holbein was already sickening when he made it, so that it had to be done in a hurry, or he may have been merely alarmed, owing to the number of people daily dying around him, including, as Mr. Lionel Cust points out,[716] some members of John of Antwerp’s own household, in whose dwelling, he suggests, Holbein may himself have contracted the disease. The meaning of the two official acts is not easy to follow, but the explanation given by Sir Augustus W. Franks, F.S.A., procured from a legal source, is no doubt the correct one. “Though the two official acts which follow the copy of the Will may at first appear inconsistent both with the Will and also with each other; yet, if we suppose that John Anwarpe was considered to have been appointed executor by implication (which the law allowed), much of the seeming inconsistency will disappear. The object of the renunciation may have been either to obviate some doubt which existed as to whether John Anwarpe was so made executor (for the language is hardly strong enough), or to avoid certain liabilities that would have affected him as executor, but not as administrator. Formerly a person was said to have died intestate, not only when he left no Will, but also when he left a Will and appointed no executor, or appointed executors and they all renounced. In this administration act the testator is accordingly said to have died intestate. The great difficulty in these official acts is how John Anwarpe could have been executor and Mr. Anthony not. The second of the two is almost a repetition of the first, and both are dated on the same day.”[717]

The will is of great interest, not only as proving the date of Holbein’s death within a week or two, but also as affording some information as to his worldly position and his personal friends. Although his practice in London was a large one, he died somewhat heavily in debt, and the inference is that he had not saved money. What his personal possessions consisted of, the document, so hastily drawn, does not say, but, unlike a number of his fellow-artists, he does not seem to have owned any property in London. It does not necessarily follow, however, that he was extravagant in his habits, though he kept a horse and owed money. It has been assumed that the frequent payment of his salary in advance was due to improvidence; but there is nothing beyond the terms of his will to support this, or to show that he spent all his income on himself, and that he failed to send money regularly to Basel in support of his wife and family. The reference to his two children at nurse indicates some irregular connection in England, which may have been one of the reasons which made him disinclined to return permanently to Basel in accordance with the wish of his fellow-townsmen. Considering the laxity of morals at that period, the fact that he had a second family in London is not very surprising. It has been suggested that the mother of these children died of the plague shortly before the artist, and that his will was made through anxiety to provide for them should he in turn be taken with the rapid and usually fatal disease, to which most victims succumbed within three days. The amount bequeathed for these children’s maintenance, about three half-pence a day each, does not seem much, but when the relative value of money at that time is taken into consideration, it was no doubt enough for their simple needs. What eventually became of them is not known.

With regard to the four witnesses to the will, all of whom were, no doubt, personal friends of the painter, nothing is known with any certainty except as regards John of Antwerp. The Mr. Anthony of Greenwich, one of the King’s servants, to whom Holbein owed the considerable amount of £10, 13s. 7d., is evidently the same individual who witnessed the will as Anthony Snecher, armourer, although the words “before said” do not occur against his name as witness as they do in the case of John of Antwerp. Both Mr. Black and Sir A. Franks, however, appear to have regarded them as two distinct persons.[718] The former suggested that “Mr. Anthony” was Anthony Anthony, one of the officers of the Ordnance Department, who had some skill as an illuminator, if the embellishments of certain rolls dealing with the navy and signed by him were from his hand, as is probable. The latter thought that Anthony Snecher was possibly one of the body of German armourers in the regular employment of the King at Greenwich, of whom Erasmus Kirkheimer was the chief, and that Holbein may have supplied him with designs for the ornamentation of weapons. Mr. J. Gough Nichols suggested that Mr. Anthony may have been Anthony Toto, the painter, with whom Holbein must have been acquainted, and with whom he may have worked in conjunction with other foreign artists upon the decoration of Nonsuch Palace.

Of Olryck Obinger, the merchant, nothing is known, but from his name he must have been a Swiss or German, possibly a merchant of the Steelyard, though there is no reference to him in the State Papers, which contain the names of a large number of the members of that body. From his name, too, Harry Maynert, the painter, also appears to have been a German or a Fleming. He remains an indefinite figure at present.[719] Mr. Black suggested that he might be a relation of the John Maynard who was one of the painters employed on the tomb of Henry VII. A relationship is also possible with the Katherine Maynors, of Antwerp, a painter, who obtained letters of denization in England in 1540, at which time she was a widow.

The discovery of the will put an end to the tradition which had existed from the beginning of the seventeenth century that Holbein died in 1554. This mistake is to be traced back to the publication of Carel van Mander’s Het Schilder Boeck, published in 1604, two years before the writer’s death. In his account of Holbein he concludes by saying: “Soo is Holbeen in groote benoutheydt te Londen ghestorven van de Pest Ao 1554, oudt 56 Jaren.” [Thus did Holbein die in London, of the plague, in great distress, in the year 1554, fifty-six years old. Succeeding writers copied from Van Mander. Joachim von Sandrart repeated the statement in his Teutsche Akademie—“Wurde er 1554 im 56 Jahre seines Alters von der damals in Londen wütenden Pest hingerafft”—and later biographers continued the error, which led to great confusion, as it added eleven years to the painter’s life, and caused almost all Tudor portraits bearing dates between 1544 and 1554 to be attributed to him. Wornum suggests that the letter from the Burgomaster of Basel to Jacob David, the Parisian goldsmith, with reference to Philip Holbein, which is dated 1545 and speaks of Holbein, the father, as then deceased, may have been shown to Van Mander or copied for him, and that in transcribing it, or even in the printing of his book, the last two figures of the date were accidentally transferred, so that 45 was turned into 54.[720] Such mistakes are not of uncommon occurrence, and this solution may be the true one. There was no plague raging in London in 1554, while in 1543 there was an unusually severe visitation. Otherwise Van Mander’s account of the painter’s death is substantially correct. The place of his burial remains uncertain, but according to tradition, as voiced by Strype, he was interred in the church of St. Catherine Cree. Strype, in his additions to Stow’s Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster,[721] says: I have been told that Hans Holben, the great and inimitable painter in King Henry VIII’s Time, was buried in this Church; and that the Earl of Arundel, the great Patron of Learning and Arts, would have set up a Monument to his Memory here, had he but known whereabouts the Corps lay.”

The same story was told by Sandrart, without mentioning the church. He supposed that the Earl’s difficulty arose from the fact that so many people were dying daily, and had to be buried in such haste, that Holbein probably shared a common grave with others, and that no record would be kept. There can be little doubt that he would be buried in or near the parish in which he was residing. The church of St. Catherine Cree, though in the next parish, is not many hundred yards distant from the Church of St. Andrew Undershaft, and it is probable that Holbein was interred in one or the other of them, possibly the latter, confusion as to the exact locality having arisen at a later date owing to the close proximity of the two churches. Unfortunately no registers of the time are available. St. Andrew Undershaft escaped the Great Fire, but its register from 1538 to 1579 has disappeared, while that of St. Catherine Cree begins only in 1663.

Holbein’s wife and family are not mentioned in his will, and what little is known of their further history is largely due to the researches of Dr. His-Heusler in the Basel archives. His wife survived him for six years, dying early in 1549, after a somewhat lengthy illness, as on the 9th of July in the preceding year she appointed, for this reason, a deputy to manage her affairs. It is to be gathered that she was left by Holbein in a fairly comfortable position, what with the annual pension allowed her by the civic authorities, the two houses which her husband had purchased fifteen years earlier, and the legacy from his uncle Sigmund, which the painter does not appear to have touched. Nor does it follow, because she was not mentioned in the will, that he had failed to send to her at least a part of his English earnings. An inventory taken on the 8th of March 1549, shortly after her death, shows that she was fairly well provided with worldly goods. In addition to furniture, an ample supply of linen, and the more ordinary household utensils, she possessed two silver-gilt covered cups, six silver goblets, a dozen silver-plated spoons, and a valise with a portion of her deceased husband’s wardrobe, including a black cap, a Spanish cape trimmed with velvet, a doublet of smoke-coloured Florentine taffeta, and others of black satin, crimson silk, and black damask. These garments must have been left behind by Holbein when he visited Basel in 1538, rather than forwarded after his death by his executor, who, according to the terms of the will, was obliged to sell everything. His stepson, Franz Schmid, who carried on his father’s tanning business, died before his mother, leaving two children.

Some years after 1545, Holbein’s eldest son, Philip, having completed his apprenticeship to Jacob David in Paris, from whose service he only obtained release after the Basel Town Council had come to his assistance, worked for a time as a goldsmith in Lisbon, and finally settled in Augsburg, where he founded a diamond-cutting business. He in turn had a son named Philip, who, in 1611, petitioned the Emperor Matthias for a confirmation and augmentation of “his old and noble coat of arms.” In this document, in which he describes himself as Imperial court jeweller and a citizen of Augsburg, he speaks of his grandfather Johann, as “the painter at that time celebrated throughout Europe,” and asserts that the Holbeins were descended from a noble family of the “city of Uri.” This last statement, however, was largely imaginary, and had its sole foundation in the fact that the Holbein arms[722] were the same as those of the canton of Uri, with the exception that the latter lacked the star between the bull’s horns. This Philip Holbein, who, according to Von Mechel, had been living in Vienna since 1600, had his petition granted on the 1st October in the following year, 1612. In 1756 one of his descendants, Johann Georg Holbein, who was connected with the Court of Chancery, obtained a confirmation of the noble rank granted to his family in 1612, with the surname of Holbeinsberg, and in 1787 was raised to the rank of a Knight of the Empire, with the title of a noble of Holbeinsberg.

Holbein’s elder daughter, Katherine, married in 1545 a butcher named Jacob Gyssler, a widower with a grown-up daughter. Among the papers of Ludwig Iselin there is a list of all the deaths which occurred in Basel between 1588 and 1612, from which we learn that she died on February 8, 1590. She is described as Katharina Holbeinin, daughter of the deceased Hans Holbein, the distinguished painter, wife of a butcher. The second daughter, Küngolt, or Kunigunde, after the death of her mother, married a miller named Andreas Syff. They had a numerous family, and one of their granddaughters married Friedrich Merian, brother of the well-known engraver, Matthaüs Merian. Küngolt, according to Iselin’s list, died seven months after her sister, on September 15, 1590. She is described in the same terms, as the daughter of the celebrated artist. In this list there also occurs the name of a third lady of the Holbein family, who died on the 17th September 1594, but she is merely described as “Felicitas Holbein, wife of Conrad Volmar, died of the plague,” and it is not certain that she was one of the painter’s daughters. Nothing is known of the younger son, Jacob Holbein, except that he also became a goldsmith, and that he came to England and died in London in the summer of 1552. In 1549, at the time of his mother’s death, he was still a minor, and the document in the Basel archives dealing with the division of his property after his death is dated June 27, 1552. No other record of his presence in London has been so far traced.

The name occurs in England both before and after Hans Holbein’s residence here, but in every case the bearers of it were almost certainly Englishmen. Walpole mentions a Holbein, on the authority of an entry in a register at Wells,[723] as living in the reign of Henry VII, and conjectures him to have been a foreigner, and even a relation of Hans, and the possible author of some early paintings, including a portrait of Henry VII. In this, however, he was wrong. His Holbein was evidently an English country gentleman, and probably some relative of a certain Johannes Holbyn of North Stoke, close to Bath, who died in 1548, and left a sum of money to the Cathedral of Wells. The wills of two other well-to-do persons of this name occur in the registry of the Archidiaconal Court of Canterbury—that of John Holbein of Folkestone, dated August 21, 1534, who bequeathed forty-six shillings and eightpence for a new covered font for the parish church, and of his widow, who died shortly after him, which is dated November 25, 1534, and was proved in the following January. These people were all English, and had no connection with the painter.[724]

Holbein founded no school of painting either in England or Switzerland, and there is no evidence to show that he had any pupils. It is probable that he employed assistants when engaged upon such wall-paintings as those he carried out in Whitehall, but whoever they may have been, their engagement was only a temporary one. As already noted, there is no record, as there is in the case of several other foreign artists then resident in this country, of a royal warrant according him the privilege of employing in regular service a number of alien assistants or servants in spite of the Act which made such a proceeding illegal. No pupil of his is mentioned by any of his early biographers, and it seems almost certain that no one directly studied under him. If there had been such a painter, some record of him is almost certain to have survived. There are a number of portraits, as a rule of no very great artistic merit, in various private collections in England, which were evidently painted indirectly under his influence. Such examples are to be expected, for it was impossible for so great a master to be at work in London for so many years without a certain number of imitators springing up, who attempted to work in his methods and to copy his style. It is hardly possible now that even the names of these third-rate imitators and ineffectual rivals will be unearthed.

As already stated, prior to the discovery of his will almost all paintings bearing dates between 1543 and 1554 were ascribed to him; even to-day, in some instances, the owners, in spite of the impossibility, still adhere to the great name, as the catalogues of most of the exhibitions held within recent years dealing with the Tudor period afford proof. The authorship of these pictures must be sought for elsewhere, though in many cases the task is one of extreme difficulty. Several painters of considerable talent were at work at the English court during the years immediately following Holbein’s death, and in some instances signed and authenticated works by them exist which enable comparisons to be made and certain unsigned works from their hands to be identified with some confidence. Such men as these were Johannes Corvus and Gerlach Fliccius; but in other cases, such as that of Guillim Stretes, only the names and a few scanty records remain, and it is impossible to point to any picture which can be said with absolute certainty to have been produced by them. Lucas Hornebolt died in 1544, about six months later than Holbein, and in the same year Girolamo da Treviso was killed by a cannon-ball at the siege of Boulogne. Several of the leading Italian artists, however, continued to serve the court during the remainder of Henry VIII’s life and throughout the succeeding reign, such as Antonio Toto, the sergeant-painter, his colleague, Bartolommeo Penni, and Nicolas Bellin of Modena, though no signed or authenticated picture by any one of them has survived.

One of the most important of Holbein’s immediate successors was the Dutch painter, Guillim or Gillam Stretes, though so far no mention of him has been found prior to the accession of Edward VI. Strype’s extract from the records of the Privy Council, having reference to a payment of fifty marks made to him for two pictures of the young King and one of the Earl of Surrey, has been already quoted,[725] as well as the fact that in 1553 he was receiving, as King’s painter, an annuity of £62, 10s., more than double Holbein’s salary, showing that he was a person of importance among the painters of Edward’s reign. Reference has also been made to the attribution to Stretes of the full-length portrait of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in the collection of the Duke of Norfolk at Arundel Castle,[726] and of the duplicate version, without the painted framework, at Knole.[727] The attribution of these two works to Stretes is based entirely on the Privy Council order. Dr. Waagen[728] stated that the Arundel Castle portrait was inscribed “William Strote,” but no one else has succeeded in discovering this signature, and very possibly the name he quotes was seen by him on some old label then attached to the frame and since removed. These two portraits, as already noted, have been grouped with several other full-lengths, including the young man in red at Hampton Court Palace (No. 345 (315)), wrongly described as a portrait of the Earl of Surrey,[729] that of Sir Thomas Gresham, dated 1544, in Mercers’ Hall, the beautiful portrait of William West, Lord Delawarr,[730] belonging to Lieut.-Col. G. L. Holford, C.I.E., C.V.O., and the one of the Earl of Southampton, 1542, in the Fitzwilliam Museum.[731] These portraits display somewhat close affinities, though it is not possible to allow that all are by the same hand. The portrait of William West is a work of great power and character, and has been attributed to Holbein himself, but the style of the painting does not accord with his. All these works are of considerably earlier date than that of the Privy Council order, which is the earliest reference so far discovered touching this painter, and it is extremely doubtful whether he had anything to do with them. One is on safer ground in attributing to him some of the portraits of King Edward, which exist in considerable numbers, two of which he certainly painted, and very possibly others. These portraits of the young King, and Stretes’ probable connection with them, have been dealt with in an earlier chapter.[732] One other picture Stretes is known to have painted, for it is recorded that on New Year’s Day, 1556, he presented Queen Mary with “a table of her Majesty’s Marriage.”[733] This picture, which must have been one of particular interest, has completely disappeared. Dr. Williamson records a signed miniature by him of Edward VI, almost full-face, wearing a jewelled cap, in Earl Beauchamp’s collection at Madresfield Court,[734] and he also attributes to the same painter a second miniature of the young King, as a little boy, in the Rijks Museum, Amsterdam.[735]