Chapter IV Painter Royal 1536-1543
Queen Jane Seymour—Death of Erasmus, and title-page portrait—The Whitehall painting of Henry VIII.—Munich drawing of Henry VIII.—Birth of an heir and the “Jane Seymour Cup”—Death of the Queen—Christina, Duchess of Milan—Secret service for the King—Flying visit to Basel and arrangements for a permanent return—Apprentices his son Philip at Paris—Portrait of the Prince of Wales and the King’s return gift—Anne of Cleves—Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk—Catherine Howard—Lapse of Holbein’s Basel citizenship—Irregularities—Provision for wife and children—Residence in London—Execution of Queen Catherine Howard—Marriage of Catherine Parr—Dr. Chamber—Unfinished work for the Barber-Surgeons’ Hall—Death of Holbein—His will—Place of burial—Holbein’s genius; its true character and greatness.
These were years of pleasant friendships, too, as well as work and cares. Nicholas Bourbon, scholar and poet, after his sojourn in London, writes back in 1536: “Greet in my name as heartily as you can all with whom you know me to be connected by intercourse and friendship.” And after mentioning high dignitaries who had followed the King’s example of showing special courtesies to Bourbon, he adds: “Mr. Cornelius Heyss, my host, the King’s Goldsmith; Mr. Nicolaus Kratzer, the King’s Astronomer, a man who is brimful of wit, jest, and humorous fancies; and Mr. Hans, the Royal Painter, the Apelles of our time. I wish them from my heart all joy and happiness.” This little pen-picture of Holbein’s intimate circle is a beautiful break in the mists of centuries—and shows us what manner of men they were among whom he had made for himself an honoured place. We could ill spare it from the few and meagre records of his life. It is also the very earliest documentary evidence of his being in the King’s immediate service.
It was in this very year, 1536, that he received his commission to paint Anne Boleyn’s successor, Jane Seymour, then on the throne the block had left vacant. The Vienna Gallery possesses this painting, of which another version is at Woburn Abbey, and the chalk drawing at Windsor (Plate 30).
The Queen was noted for her milk-white fairness, and Holbein has borrowed the pearly shadows of the lily in rendering it. The figure is a little under life-size. Her head-dress and robes of silver brocade and royal velvet are studded with splendid rubies and pearls to match the jewels on her neck and breast. The hands are as full of character as of art.
The Queen’s portrait may properly be said to belong to the great wall painting which Holbein finished in 1537 for the Royal Palace at Whitehall. But before that date the painter’s inner life had suffered one more great wrench. At midnight of July 12th, 1536, Erasmus died in the home that had been his own, except for the Freiburg interval, ever since John Froben’s death in 1526; a death that had probably had much to do with Holbein’s first departure from Basel. That event had uprooted the scholar from the old house zum Sessel, in the Fischmarkt, and transplanted him to the home of Froben’s son, Hieronymus. The latter house, then known as zum Luft, is now No. 18, Bäumleingasse. And it was here that Erasmus passed away, his mind keeping to the last its humour and its interests in all around him. But no one, remembering how Fisher and More had died in the preceding year, can doubt but that the good old man was very willing to be gone, away from changed faces and changed ways—though Bonifacius Amerbach and young Froben were as sons to him.
Basel, for all her differences with him, buried Erasmus with great honours. But no tablet could so commemorate him as the noble monument which Holbein built to him in the title-page he designed for Hieronymus Froben’s edition of Erasmus’s Works, published in 1540. It is a woodcut of extraordinary beauty. The full-length figure of the scholar stands in cap and gown, with one hand resting lightly on the bust of the god Terminus (the god of immovable boundary lines, significantly conjoined to Erasmus’s chosen motto: Concedo nulli) and the other calling attention to this significant emblem of fixed convictions. Not even the Louvre oil painting expresses the whole Erasmus quite so completely or so nobly as this little drawing of the man whom Holbein had loved and revered for twenty years; and to whom he owed, in the first place, the splendid opportunities of his career in England.
And as he drew it, what ghosts of his own Past must have clustered around the lean little figure! What echoes and visions! The Rhine, the gardens, the clang of the press, the Fischmarkt, the friendly smiles at Froben’s and Meyer’s firesides; his marriage; the stars and dews and perfume of all his dreams in the years—those matchless years of a man’s young manhood—when he had walked with angels as well as peasants, had seen the Way of the Cross, the Christ in the Grave, and the Risen Lord even more clearly than the faces of flesh and blood. Eheu fugaces! “God help thee, Elia, how art thou sophisticated.”
Ah, well! Those years, and the darker, sadder years that had led far from them, were now like his oldest friends—dead and buried. The Holbein of 1537 was painting the King of England on the wall of his Privy Chamber. There was a place for honest pride as well as for honest regret in his thoughts.
This painting perished with the palace in the fire of 1698. Charles II., however, had a small copy of it made by Leemput. And a portion of Holbein’s original cartoon (Plate 31) in chalk and Indian ink, is in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire—the face much washed out by cleaning, and the outline pricked for transferring to the wall. The figures are life-size, but Walpole has already noticed how the massive proportions and solidly-planted pose of the King heighten the illusion of a Colossus. Behind him stands the admirably contrasted figure of Henry VII. The whole composition consisted of four portraits; Queen Jane Seymour opposite her husband, and the King’s mother opposite to, and on a level with, Henry VII., who stands on the elevation of the background.
The pose and costume of Henry VIII. in the cartoon were, as Leemput’s copy shows, faithfully carried out in the painting; but in the latter the face was afterwards turned to the full front view familiar to us in the many copies of the King’s portrait which so long passed as works of Holbein, on the strength of reproducing his own painting. There is no evidence that he ever again painted Henry VIII. or that he executed any replica of this portrait. The old copy at Windsor Castle serves, however, to recall its details of costume; such as his brown doublet stiff with gold brocade and scintillating with the gleams of splendid jewels, his coat of royal red embroidered with gold thread and lined with ermine to match the wide collar; his plumed and jewelled cap; as also the huge gems on collar, pendant, rings, and the gold-hilted dagger in its blue velvet sheath.
But Holbein’s own portrait of Henry VIII.—as shown by the original chalk study from life now in the Munich Gallery (Plate 32)—may in all sobriety of speech be called a stupendous work. Looking at this marvellous drawing and picturing to one’s self those cheeks informed with pulsing blood, those lips with breath, those eyes with blue gleams,—it is easy to understand that Van Mander was using no hyperbole when he said that the painting on the wall of the Privy Chamber made the stoutest knees to tremble. It was literally, as he said, “a terrible painting,” of which none of the stupidly-heavy copies that have for the most part travestied Holbein’s work give any true conception. Many a man could paint cloth-of-gold and gems; but only once and again in the centuries comes a man who can thus paint, not alone the mane and stride of the lion, but the fires that light his glance, the roar rushing to his lips. To look long into these eyes that Holbein had the genius to read and the firmness to draw, is to feel one’s self in the grip of an insatiable, implacable, yet leonine soul; a being who, to borrow the matchless description of Burke’s political career, is “parted asunder in his works like some vast continent severed by a convulsion of nature; each portion peopled by its own giant race of opinions, differing altogether in features and language, and committed in eternal hostility with one another.” And so long as the great drama of Tudor England enthrals the minds of men, hard by Shakespeare’s supreme name must be read the name of the painter in whose pages the actors in that drama have been compelled themselves to declare themselves.
To crown the King’s pride, and to the no less intense delight of the whole nation which saw in this event the rainbow of every promise, at Hampton Court, on the 12th of October, 1537, Queen Jane Seymour gave birth to the son who was to reign so briefly as Edward VI. And it was doubtless in connection with this happy circumstance that the King commissioned Holbein’s design for a truly royal piece of goldsmith’s work. This drawing, generally known as “the Jane Seymour cup,” is at Oxford, in the Bodleian Library (Plate 33).
No sketch of the artist’s powers would be even barely complete without a realising sense of their versatility. And in this design Holbein has more than equalled the highest achievement of his great contemporary, Benvenuto Cellini, at this time in the service of the French Court. The initials of the King and Queen, H. and J., and the exceedingly judicious motto of the latter—“Bound to obey and to serve”—are recurring devices. But it is in the originality and unflawed beauty of the whole—the springing grace of outline, the taste and cunning with which flowers of gold naturally bloom into gems and pearls, the combination of freest, richest fancy with every restraint of a pure taste—that the perfection of this little masterpiece consists.
In the midst of all the public rejoicings, the Te Deums, feasts, and bonfires, came the thunderclap of the young mother’s death. Some negligence had permitted her to take cold, and on the twelfth day after his coveted heir was born, Henry VIII. was once again a widower. The Court went into deepest mourning until the 3rd of February. But Thomas Cromwell was very shortly authorised to take secret steps to ascertain what Princess might most suitably fill the late Queen’s vacant place and strengthen the assurance of an unbroken succession.
Choice fell at first on a Roman Catholic—Christina, the sixteen-year-old widow of Francis Sforza Duke of Milan, who had died in the autumn of 1535. The upshot of private inquiries was that Holbein was sent over to Brussels in March, 1538, to bring back a portrait of this daughter of Christian of Denmark and niece of Charles V. And although the painter had but three hours in which to do it, he did make what Hutton described as her “very perffight” image; besides which, said the envoy, the portrait previously despatched, though painted in all her state finery, “was but slobbered.”
From this “perffight” painting, which could not have been more than one of his portrait studies, he afterwards completed that full-length oil painting which is worthy to rank with his great Morett portrait. By the kindness of the Duke of Norfolk, who has lent it, this beautiful work is now in the National Gallery (Plate 34). But unhappily for its best appreciation, to my thinking at least, it hangs at one side and in too close proximity to the bold colouring of “The Ambassadors”; so that its own subtle, yet reticent superiority is well-nigh shouted down by its lusty neighbour. It is a picture to be seen by itself; as it must stand by itself in the usual inane gallery of women’s portraits.
Hutton tells us that the painter who “slobbered” Christina’s portrait had painted her in full dress. But Holbein’s eye was quick to recognise the values of her everyday dress—the widow’s costume of Italy—in enhancing the distinction of her face and the stately slenderness of her figure. And so he drew her as she stood, with a hint of bending forward, her gloves being restlessly fingered in a shy yet proud embarrassment, in the first moments when he saw her.
The portrait is nearly life-size. Over a plain black satin dress she wears a gown of the same material, lined with yellow sable. Her hair is entirely concealed by a black hood. At her throat and wrists are plain cambric frills. The ranging scale of tawny tones—in the floor, the gloves, the fur, the golden glint in her brown eyes—and the one ruby, on her hand, are the only colours, except those of her fresh young lips and skin and the black and white of her costume. “She is not so white as the late Queen,” wrote Hutton, “but she hath a singular good countenance, and when she chanceth to smile there appeareth two pits in her cheeks and one in her chin, the which becometh her excellently well.”
It is easy to believe that they did, but her dimples did not chance for Henry VIII. Whether she really sent him, along with her picture, the witty refusal credited to her—that she had but one head; had she two, one should be at His Majesty’s service—or whether it was the Emperor’s doing entirely that his niece married the Duke of Lorraine instead of the man whose first wife had been Charles V.’s aunt, there is, at all events, a soft lurking devil in the demure little face which seems to whisper that the answer was one which she could have made an’ she would.
Van Mander heard from Holbein’s circle a story which modern pedantry is inclined to flout. This is, that when an irate nobleman wanted the painter punished for an affront, the King hotly exclaimed:—“Understand, my lord, that I can make seven earls out of as many hinds, any day; but out of seven earls I could not make one such painter as this Holbein.” An eminently ben-trovato story, at all events. And certain it is that the painter stood sufficiently high in the royal favour to be despatched on some special private mission for the King in the summer of 1538, of which the secret was so well kept that nothing beyond the record of payment for it has ever transpired.
From this date Holbein’s name is regularly down in the Royal Accounts. The amounts drawn total, it has been computed, about £360 in present value, and would make an agreeable annual addition to his other earnings. So that it is little wonder he was not tempted by the small sum offered by the Basel Council in 1532. But in 1538 the Council greatly increased the old offer, and was so anxious to have him among her citizens that the painter seized the opportunity of his secret mission to Upper Burgundy, whatever it was, to pay a flying visit to Basel in the interests of his family.
His old companions of the Guild of St. Johann Vorstadt made this visit—when Holbein was back among them, as was noted, “in silk and velvet”—the occasion of a grand banquet in his honour. But the real motive for his visit was to arrange upon what terms he could meet the Council’s wishes. The terms were far from ungenerous, as is shown by the contract which followed him back to London.
In this the Council bound itself, in consideration of the great honour of retaining in their city a painter “famous beyond all other painters on account of the riches of his art,” and in further consideration of his promise to make no absence from Basel more prolonged than should be really necessary to carry his foreign commissions to their destination and receive his pay for them—to give him an annuity of fifty guldens, equally whether Holbein should be ill or well, but only during his own life. In addition to this, they granted him permission to make short visits to specified art-centres, of which Milan was one, “once, twice, or thrice, every year.” And recognising the impossibility of his freeing himself from his English engagements in less than two years, they also granted him this interval before he need resume his residence at Basel; and engaged to pay forty guldens yearly to his wife, on his behalf, for each of these two years.
There is every probability that Holbein himself took a goodly sum to Basel to invest for his family’s permanent benefit in one way and another. For it could only have been as a part of this gleaning for them that he drew—as the Account Books show that he did just at this juncture—a whole year’s salary in advance from the Royal Exchequer; seeing that the same books prove that he was liberally paid for all his own expenses on the King’s service, in addition to his regular salary.
Part of the sum he collected to take with him was doubtless used to apprentice his son Philip, now sixteen, to the goldsmith’s trade. And that the father chose Paris for this purpose, where he left Philip on his return journey, might well be due either to his own estimation of Jerome David, to whom Philip was indentured, or to the fact that Benvenuto Cellini’s presence at Paris afforded some advantage; or that his own promised return to Basel would make it preferable to have the lad on the same side of the Channel as all his family. And that Holbein fully intended to make the necessary and obvious sacrifice involved in exchanging London for Basel is also proved by a contemporary account. “His intention was,” says his fellow-townsman, “had God lengthened his life, to paint many of his pictures again at his own expense, as well as the hall in the Rathaus. The paintings on the Haus zum Tanz he pronounced ‘pretty good.’” But it was not to be.
His New Year’s offering to the King on the opening of 1539 was a portrait, probably the oil painting in the Hague Gallery, of the infant Prince of Wales. It was a spirited picture of the royal baby with his gold rattle in his chubby little fist, such as might have delighted a father less doting than Henry VIII., whose return gift is recorded: “To Hans Holbyne, paynter, a gilte cruse with a cover, weighing x oz. 1 quarter.” The cruse was made by a friend of the painter; that Cornelius Hayes, goldsmith, whom Bourbon’s letter mentioned in connection with him in 1536.
All these months the negotiations for the hand of the Duchess of Milan had fluctuated with the varying fortunes of the King’s relations with her uncle, Charles V. But at last they had altogether collapsed with what seemed to Henry VIII. the threatening attitude assumed by the Emperor and the Pope. Hereupon followed that historical chapter, so full of fatal consequences to Cromwell, and no less big with shame for the King’s own story: the pitiful chapter of Anne of Cleves.
Her brother, the Duke of Cleves, was at this time a troublesome foe to the Emperor; while the fact that she was a Protestant was a “Roland” for the Imperial and Papal “Oliver.” So Holbein was again posted off to bring back a counterfeit of Anne, and to carry to her a miniature of the King. And by the 1st September he had acquitted himself of the new mission.
There is not an iota of historical or other evidence for that “Flanders mare” anecdote, which seems to have had a gratuitous as well as spontaneous origin in Bishop Burnet’s seventeenth-century brain, to the effect that the King was the victim of a flattering portrait by Holbein, and cruelly undeceived by the actual looks of his bride. In the first place his agents wrote to him frankly that the Princess was of no great beauty, though not uncomely, and “never from the ellebowe of the Ladye Duchesse her Mother,” who was said to be most unwilling to part with her (as a mother might well be, for the husband in question). The King was also told that she was quite unskilled in languages or music, and held, with her mother, that it was “for a rebuke and an occasion of lightenesse that great Ladyes shuld be lernyd or have enye knowledge of musike.” And in the next place even a superficial knowledge of Holbein would disprove any tradition of “flattery” from his unflinching, almost brutally truthful brush. It was hardly likely that the painter who would not stoop to flatter Bishop Stokesley, or Henry VIII. himself, would be swerved from his good faith by Anne of Cleves.
On the contrary, the painting, in oils on vellum and mounted on a panel, now in the Louvre (Plate 35), is the very embodiment of contemporary accounts of this Princess. Her fair-skinned, commonplace, yet “not uncomely” face looks out placidly at you from the quaint Flemish head-dress of fine gauze and jewelled cloth-of-gold. Her inert hands (Holbein’s hands belong to his truth-telling revelations), jewelled even on the thumb, are listlessly clasped upon each other; her crimson-velvet dress is heavily banded with gold and pearl embroidery.
No Venus certainly, and perhaps somewhat heavily handicapped by the maternal “elbowe.” But still perfectly in keeping with her descriptions and making no denial to the French Ambassador’s statement that she was “the gentlest and kindest” of queens; or to an English eye-witness who writes that at her coronation the people all applauded her for being “so fayre a Ladye, of so goodly a stature and so womanly a countenance, and in especial of so good qualities.”
The fact is that the King’s very cruelty to this poor girl—torn from her mother’s side and her Protestant home in Dürren to be the pawn of an unscrupulous diplomacy—was based on grounds, at least, less infamous than that of a slave-buyer. After both Cromwell and Holbein had been well rewarded for their services, the former lost his head and the Queen her crown on considerations that took no more account of her looks than her feelings. The Catholic glass had risen; the King himself was not ashamed to avow it; and the Protestant alliance was therefore an incubus. After some two months of a queen’s and wife’s estate, poor Anne of Cleves was bid to pack her belongings and take up a separate establishment as an unmarried woman. No wonder she fainted when first informed of such an infamy.
But there was no law in England save the fiat of Henry VIII. The marriage was pronounced “null and void,” and Anne retired into private life, on the rigid condition that she would make no attempt to ever quit England, with an allowance of £3,000 a year, and the formal title of the King’s “sister.” There was no help for her. Never again for her would there be the austere joys of Dürren—her mother’s side, her own timid dreams of other companionship, and never the price at which she had lost them.
At the head of the triumphant anti-Protestant, anti-Cromwell party stood Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk, whose portrait, in the Royal Collection at Windsor, Holbein painted about this time (Plate 36). The lean face and the figure clothed in red stand out strikingly from the plain green background, although the painting has suffered not a little injury. The robe is lined and trimmed with ermine, and over it is the collar and badge of the Order of the Garter. In his right hand he holds the gold baton of his office as Earl Marshal, and in his left the White Staff of the Lord Chamberlain.
According to Roper, Norfolk, then Earl of Surrey, was a great friend of Sir Thomas More. But it would be hard to imagine a greater contrast than the records of the two men. The latter a pattern of personal purity and lofty ideals; the former as venal as the King’s Parliaments, and as unscrupulous in pursuit of his passions as the King himself.
Norfolk’s star of influence had already waxed and waned with the evil destinies of one niece, before it arose anew with the fortunes of another only to plunge sharply after them into the gulf of ruin. For the present he and Gardiner, restored to favour with him, were all-powerful. Their calculations seemed to prosper, too, beyond their most ambitious dreams, when, instead of ruling through a rival to Anne who should be the King’s mistress, they were to rule through a legal successor. For the King was nothing if not technically correct; and from the moment when the fatal royal glance flamed on Catherine Howard when Gardiner was entertaining him, nothing would do but she should become his wife. And thus once more the wild wheel of Fortune was to make Norfolk uncle to a Queen of England.
Anne was divorced on the 12th of July, 1540, and on the 28th of the same month, on the very day when Thomas Cromwell was beheaded, the King married Anne Boleyn’s cousin, Catherine Howard. On the 8th of August she was proclaimed Queen, and on the 15th of that month she was publicly prayed for as such in all the churches of the realm. Well might she be! Dry your outraged tears, Anne of Cleves, and give thanks to God that you are well out of it!
There is a miniature in the Windsor Collection now believed to be Holbein’s portrait of Catherine Howard. Until recently it was held to be the portrait of Catherine Parr. But there is a larger portrait of the former among the Windsor drawings, a study evidently made for an oil painting (Plate 37). By this it seems that she had auburn hair, hazel eyes, a fair complexion, and a piquant smile. There is a painting which accords with this drawing in the Duke of Buccleuch’s collection, but it is said to be by a French artist.
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.
This work Holbein did not live to finish; and it is to-day exceedingly doubtful as to how much of the smoke-blackened painting is by him. The very drawing has a woodenness foreign to his compositions, and much of the painting is by an evidently inferior hand. But good judges hold some of the heads to be undoubtedly his work.
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—
One of the few, the immortal names
That were not born to die.
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.”