S. L. Bensusan

“ THE ARTIST'S LIFE
If we may accept the balance of evidence, Hans Holbein was born in the last years of the fifteenth century in Augsburg, then a city of great importance. The visitor to Bavaria to-day will find few traces of its vanished prosperity, but in the years when Hans Holbein was a little boy Augsburg held merchant princes by the dozen, and men of distinction by the score, and enjoyed the favour of the Emperor Maximilian, himself no mean patron of the arts. ”

“ For he was the strong man armed [16] at all points, who chose to be an artist, though many another path before him would have led to fame.
It is not difficult, if one has a certain measure of talent, to impose upon one's contemporaries. Criticism is seldom exhaustive or final until time has taken its stand between man and his labours, adjusting the earlier perspective that is seldom correct and never exact, but with Holbein the case was different. His generation recognised a genius to which we pay tribute after 350 years have passed away. ”

“ He painted among many works of the first class a portrait of his patron Boniface Amerbach, the famous "Dead Man," said by some to be a picture of the dead Christ, a portrait of Erasmus and the "Zetter Madonna." Of these the "Dead Man" is in Basle, one of Erasmus is there, and another is in the Louvre, while the "Zetter Madonna" is at Soluthurn. Of course he did a great deal of work that cannot be enumerated here—work of the most varied description and almost unvarying excellence, and it is clear that he owed not a little of his achievement to the steadiness of his labours. ”

“ Naturally an artist is judged very readily by his efforts in portraiture, for they are the things that appeal most readily to the eye; but in the case of Holbein, who would have been a great master if he had never painted a portrait, it is well to look in other directions for evidences of his many gifts. ”

“ We owe the existing collection in a very large extent to Boniface Amerbach, the artist's friend and early patron, who, recognising the permanent value of his output, collected all he could secure, and established the nucleus of a collection that forms to-day Basle's chief claim to distinction. If others had been equally far seeing, many a treasure now lost or destroyed would remain to inspire and to teach ”

“ Fame travelled slowly in the sixteenth century, but it had not so far to go as it must to-day. The art centres were small and few, they belonged exclusively to the western world, and there were no swarms of influential mediocrities to secure work that belonged of right to better men. ”

“ King Henry took him into his service with a retainer of £30 a year, no inconsiderable sum in those days, and payment for all works done, and he soon became a painter of the pictures that are produced to commemorate state occasions. Happily he painted them better than some more modern men have been able to. It is hardly a reproach to a man that he cannot invest with special interest a picture that is to all intent and purpose composed for him, a canvas on which the figures must be handled less with regard to composition than precedence, and really Holbein did very well. ”

“ No flâneur on the high-road of sixteenth-century life, no chronicler of the times and changes of his generation, has anything to record, because the world then took no count of the coming or going of the great men who claimed fame through the arts. ”

“ Great financiers of Augsburg brought artists and craftsmen from other towns, and it is safe to assume that the best of them would have been found in the hall of the Guild from time to time exhibiting their own work, and telling an interested gathering of the wonders of other cities in days when the journey across the frontiers of one's own country was not to be safely or lightly undertaken. ”

“ Holbein's capacity for expressing strength in the most delicate fashion imaginable appealed very strongly to his sitters. The rugged character of one man's head, the delicate lines of a woman's face, could be expressed without violence in the one case or excess of sentiment in the other, and he does not seem to have done more than present his sitters in their most attractive aspect, and with due regard to their salient characteristics. ”

“ The extraordinary success of his portraiture is best understood when we learn that for most of his work he did not trouble sitters after the modern fashion. They sat to him for a sketch, and then he took the sketch away with him and produced in due course the finished portrait. When we look at the portraits in the great European galleries, at Windsor or Basle, the Louvre or Munich, we may be astonished that such results should be achieved from mere sketches. ”

“ We who come to pay our tribute of admiration so long after opinion, good or bad, has [17] ceased to concern the artist, are at no small disadvantage. We can learn little or nothing about the personal details of his life; the year of his birth and even the place are in dispute, while between the various authorities who deal with the date of his death there is a difference of no less than twelve years, although the balance of evidence is greatly in favour of the earlier date and shorter life. ”

“ Not only did it delight the magnates of the Steelyard, who showered commissions upon him as long as he could execute them, it carried the story of his fame to the last corner of the earth where the story of a man's achievement can obtain a generous hearing, that is to his own city. Burgomaster Meier zum Hirten, not to be confused with that other Meier who married Dorothea Kannegiesser and looks at us to-day from the walls of the Basle Museum, wrote to Holbein in London inviting him to return, with the promise of a retainer of thirty gulden annually. ”

“ But, considering the work he did, in its extent and quality, we have every reason to believe that the artist was born to succeed, and that had he been an engineer, a general, or a statesman, he would have left the same indelible mark upon his generation, and would have been remembered with gratitude and admiration by those who came after him. ”

“ Hans Holbein the younger is of the smaller and more distinguished class that accepts tradition just so far as it is useful or indispensable, and can face the problems of changing seasons and new thought with perfect confidence and unerring instinct, finding no terror in change. His father was an artist, and this fact would seem to have marked out his path in life. ”

“ Then again, even in those days, when war was still considered in certain quarters to be the only occupation for a gentleman, art knew no boundaries in the civilised world, and the artist, as a valued contributor to the beauty of life, could pass through countries in which his countrymen of other pursuits would have received scant welcome. Of course there were exceptions to this general rule, and curiously enough Basle, in which the Lutherans were [47] gaining ground so rapidly, had become an impossible place for Holbein by the summer of 1526. ”

“ Moreover, a great part of the artist's output is lost. In these days, when the work of old masters is being discovered so frequently, and many a forgotten chef d'œuvre is being rescued from oblivion, there is every reason to hope that the future has something valuable in store for us. But we know that, as far as this country is concerned, much of the labour of Holbein's hands has passed beyond recall. ”

“ Augsburg, and doubtless the story of Italian prosperity had lost nothing on its journey across the Tyrol. The Bavarian city would expect its prosperous Guild to achieve distinction, and was ready and able to respond to progress, so that the conditions were very favourable to endeavour and to success. Every great city sought to achieve renown by raising in its midst, or attracting to its circle, scholars and artists of world-wide repute. Hans Holbein had a double advantage. ”

“ It may suffice us amply that the great artist left many and varied monuments of his achievements, and that the most, or very many, of these are open to our inspection to this day, that they have preserved their [29] quality and their power to teach as well as to charm succeeding generations. ”

“ Our interest in fine art is comparatively modern; only in the last hundred years have the rank and file of cultured, wealthy, or leisured people bethought them of the great treasures that lay neglected in the highways and byways of big cities ”

“ Each portrait may be seen in the large salon of the Museum, and the attractions of the lady must have been more apparent to the painter than they are to us. Some say that it was his desire to flee from before the face of his inamorata that turned Holbein's feet towards London, others that it was the strength of the [48] Lutheran movement that made men look askance at the arts. Be that as it may he came to town, and Basle's loss was England's gain. ”

“ Erasmus lives for us in several portraits by Holbein, and there can be no doubt but that association with the leading literary men of the city must have done a great deal to develop in the painter the measure of culture that was to serve him in good stead when he left the city of Basle for places more important and the service of exalted patrons. ”

“ Her portrait may be seen in Basle to-day, and there is one that is said to stand for the painter himself, also a work of his hand. The drawing depicts a strong man, who looks out upon the world with serene consciousness that he can play a full and worthy part in it.
When he was a married man and a citizen of Basle, Holbein developed to a very considerable extent his earlier acquaintance with the Humanists. ”

“ The favour extended to a fine picture must be enduring, nor will ten generations of careful attention atone for ten years of bad housing and neglect.
We owe a great deal to Holbein, because [20] he was one of the few great painters of the sixteenth century who pictured the commercial age that others had held in contempt. He seems to have seen that Europe had reached the parting of the ways, and that war was no longer to stand as the greatest interest of national life. ”

“ He prepared a chalk drawing of the unfortunate Jane Seymour and painted two portraits from it, one being in Vienna and the other at Woburn Abbey; and he painted Henry himself for the Privy Chamber, which was burnt out in the closing years of the seventeenth century. ”