Arthur B. Chamberlain

“ It is a series of short pictorial sermons, in which the artist points out to the reader how slight and how uncertain is his hold upon life, and how in the presence of death both Prince and peasant are equal. In the satire with which Holbein has treated clerics of all degrees we learn something of the way in which the Reformation influenced him. Each little picture is a masterpiece of art, in which is depicted, with grim humour, death’s unexpected approach, sparing neither King nor Pontiff, Queen nor courtesan, knight nor beggar, old age nor childhood. ”

“ All the accessories, whether of silk, or linen, or gold, or steel, or glass, are painted with a fidelity to nature never excelled by the Dutchmen or Flemings of the following century, who devoted their whole career to the rendering of still-life. In Holbein’s work, however, this elaboration of detail is soon forgotten in the fascination which the vivid representation of the sitter’s personality produces in the spectator and the power displayed by the artist in seizing the essentials of a character. ”

“ As a colourist he had a keen sense of the values of tone relations, a sense in which Dürer again was lacking; not so Teutonic in every way as the Nuremberg master, he formed a link between the Italian and German races. A less powerful personality than Dürer, he was a far superior painter. Proud may that country be indeed that counts two names so great in art.”
It is an almost impossible task to sum up in a short paragraph the leading characteristics of Holbein’s art. In his great decorative wall-paintings he rivalled many of the best Italian painters of the Renaissance. ”

“ OUR ILLUSTRATIONS AMONG the many splendid portraits which Holbein painted it is difficult to make a selection for the purpose of illustration. The Meyer Madonna has been included as his finest religious painting and his most celebrated work. Although the Portrait of the Duchess of Milan and The Ambassadors are now in the National Gallery, and so are accessible to all, they have been reproduced, because the first is in many ways the best portrait, and certainly the most fascinating Holbein ever accomplished, while the second is the most important work of the master now remaining in England. ”

“ But every change of shade is felt, every rich and rubied line of petal followed, every subdued gleam in the soft blue of the enamel and bending of the gold touched with a hand whose patience of regard creates rather than paints. The jewel itself was not so precious as the rays of enduring light which form it, beneath that errorless hand. The man himself what he was—not more ”

“ Another little work of great beauty, and important as being the only sacred painting by Holbein now in England, is the Noli Me Tangere at Hampton Court (see p. 58) .
A very remarkable picture of The Dead Christ (Basle) was painted in 1521. The nude body lies in a narrow tomb of marble, open at the side. Except for the stigmata, there is very little religious signification in it. The painful subject has been in no way idealized; it is, on the contrary, one of the most vividly realistic paintings of a dead man ever produced by a great painter. ”

“ Holbein probably made one of his usual black-and-white crayon studies touched with colour, and from this, after his return to London, painted the full-length portrait belonging to the Duke of Norfolk, which he has lent so generously for a number of years to the National Gallery.
Christina stands, almost the size of life, facing the spectator, dressed in “mourning aparel after the manner of Italy”—a black satin gown, and over it a long black cloak lined with yellow sable. A black hood covers her hair and part of her forehead, and a ruby ring is her only ornament. ”

“ It is uncertain when Holbein first became acquainted with the great scholar of Antwerp, Desiderius Erasmus, who had come to Basle in 1513 for the purpose of superintending the publishing of his books, nor is it easy to say to what degree of intimacy the artist was admitted by this brilliant humanist. Erasmus had the greatest admiration for his powers as an artist, and served him whenever he could, both by employing him himself and recommending him to others. ”

“ The happy-looking Child of the Darmstadt picture has been copied so badly and with so unhappy an expression that it has been thought to represent a sick child, and it is probably owing to this that a number of fanciful interpretations have been given of the hidden meaning of the picture. Both in colour and in effect the copy in no way equals the original, which is in all ways a picture of noble simplicity, splendid colour, and striking veracity of portraiture. ”

“ One can see at a glance that here was a man who would always be just in his dealings with others, and unchangeable in carrying out what he knew to be his duty—a student and a man of deep learning, and yet a man of affairs and of the world, trusted by his King and admired by his equals, and losing his head on the block through his invincible honesty. ”

“ He puts but little of himself into his portraits, and almost everything of his sitter. No great subtleties of light and shade are brought in to aid the artistic result; and even colour, delightful and harmonious in a high degree as Holbein’s colour always is, is not allowed to usurp the attention from the purpose of the work, the complete realization of both the outward and inner man. What at the first glance{39} seems almost an unnatural flatness in his painting of a face displays upon examination the most delicate and accurate modelling of form. ”

“ The work of Holbein is true and thorough, accomplished in the highest, as the most literal, sense, with a calm entireness of unaffected resolution which sacrifices nothing, forgets nothing, and fears nothing. Holbein is complete; what he sees, he sees with his whole soul ”

“ Both artist and woodcutter seem to have been occupied with the commission until 1526, in which year Lützelburger died, and although Holbein had completed his part, the work stopped short for want of a competent engraver. Neither series was published until 1538, when Holbein was at his zenith as a portrait painter in England. The Dance of Death has been popularized by many reprints and reproductions; indeed, these satires on the uncertainty of life, homilies in miniature, drawn with the most surprising power and artistic beauty within the smallest limits, soon became famous throughout Europe. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Holbein’s versatility as an artist is nowhere shown more convincingly than in the illustrations he made for printed books, and the series of woodcuts which were published from his designs during the last decade of his life. His title-pages, initial letters, chapter headings, and ornamental borders, for Froben and other printers, display a rich invention, greatly in advance of most similar work of that period. In some of them the artist’s sureness of hand and firmness of drawing have been sadly blunted by the incapacity of the woodcutter. ”

“ Holbein seems to have painted Erasmus three or four times, and as the originals were multiplied by copyists during the artist’s life, there are still a large number of portraits of the great scholar in existence, all to-day ascribed to our painter. At least two of them were sent to England by Erasmus as presents to Sir Thomas More and Archbishop Wareham, one of which was the picture now at Longford Castle, and the other the fine profile in the Louvre, which was formerly in Charles I.’s collection.
The Earl of Radnor’s Erasmus is a masterly and lifelike portrait. ”

“ He constantly noted the slight difference in the shape of two sides of a face, and that a man’s eyes were not always of the same size, characteristics which even the best artists have sometimes failed to see. His painting of hair and of beards displays a marvellous fidelity to nature, and his drawing of hands, and the expression he puts into them, is extraordinary. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Town Council was no longer in a position to encourage the development of the fine arts, and the Basle painters had a very hard struggle to live, and were glad of trivial employment, which in better times they would have scorned. Holbein, too, had married, about 1520, Elsbeth Schmidt, the widow of a tanner with one son, and had a young family of his own, so that he found it increasingly difficult to make both ends meet. He therefore thought seriously of visiting England in quest of work, probably at the suggestion of Erasmus, who had many friends and correspondents there. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Louvre example, showing Erasmus writing, in profile, is smaller and richer in colour than the Longford example, and even more searching in its rendering of truth and character.
The superb portrait of Georg Gisze, member of the Hanse League and the London Steelyard, painted in 1532, shortly after Holbein’s return to{52} England, and now in the Berlin Gallery, is finer in its colour and more delicate in the rendering of its details than any other of the Steelyard portraits done by the artist about this time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Virgin is seated with the Child on her knee under an open arch, and her figure stands out against the blue sky which is seen through it. Her face is very sweet and sympathetic. The naked Child, with its little arms stretched out, is a delightful piece of portraiture, while the two saints are magnificent figures. This picture, deeply reverent{32} in feeling, is conceived with great simplicity, but is very noble in sentiment.
The Meyer Madonna, in Darmstadt, Holbein’s greatest masterpiece of religious painting, and one of the finest sacred pictures in the world, is fully described on p. ”

“ They are less known than The Dance of Death woodcuts, and in them the artist has put a curb on his fertile imagination, and confines himself to telling the sacred stories with great simplicity and directness, while nothing essential to the full understanding of the story is omitted.
In addition to these more important woodcuts, Holbein also designed several series of ornamental alphabets, one of them a dance of death, another with peasants at their merrymakings, and a third with children at their games. ”

“ The magical brush of the artist has pictured for us, with a living realism, many members of the royal House of Tudor, high prelates of the Church, leading statesmen, soldiers and sailors, men of learning and of science, leaders of fashion, country gentlemen and their wives, German and English merchants, foreign diplomatists, and plain citizens. ”

“ The modelling of the head and hands is perfect in its searching truth and fine balance, showing none of that exaggeration and hardness of facial detail which so often mars the pictorial and obscures the intellectual conceptions in the portraits of Albrecht Dürer. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Each little picture, taken by itself, is a work of art and of real beauty. Two other panels in the Minster of Freiburg, somewhat similar to the above in the exceptionally successful and picturesque arrangement of the lighting, form the wings of an altar-piece, of which{31} the centre panel has disappeared. They were painted for Hans Oberreidt, one of the Basle Town Councillors, and represent The Nativity and The Adoration of the Magi, with the donor and the numerous members of his family kneeling below. All the figures are small, while the backgrounds are large and imposing. ”

“ No one north of the Alps came near to him in the fertility of design and beauty of execution and of colour displayed by him in this adaptation of a favourite method of Italian decoration which became popular in the sixteenth century in certain parts of Germany and Switzerland.{7}
Holbein was back in Basle in 1519. He joined the Painters’ Guild on September 25, and on July 3 in the following year paid his fees as a burgher of the city. One of the first portraits he now undertook was that of Bonifacius Amerbach, a brilliant young scholar and intimate friend of Erasmus and other learned men. ”

“ 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. ”