Holbein Part 6

Out of such unpromising materials has the painter made a picture that would challenge attention among any. If we knew nothing as to the ident.i.ty of this woman, sitting oblivious of the children at her knee, wrapped in her own dark thoughts, we should certainly want to know something of her story and of the story of the little fellow whose eyes are breathlessly intent upon some purer, sweeter vision. There is at Cologne, in a private collection, a deeply interesting duplicate of this work; also on paper afterwards mounted on wood, but not cut out.

Unfortunately this latter has suffered such irremediable injuries that it is quite impossible now to p.r.o.nounce upon its claim to be either the earlier example or a replica; but good judges have believed it to be by Holbein. Its chief interest, however, from a biographical point of view, may be said to lie in the sixteenth-century writing pasted on at the top. Literally translated, this runs--

"Love towards G.o.d consists in Charity.

Who hath this love can feel no hate."[5]

It is difficult to see on what grounds Woltmann, who was inclined to accept the picture as genuine, should hold the inscription to have been added by someone desirous of increasing the value of the work by representing it to be an allegorical picture of Charity. There was never a time when the allegory, if accepted, could have carried the same value as the portraits. And surely the second line is utterly inconsistent with the theory. Original or not, it has a very startling likeness to a plea which Holbein himself must have urged more than once, to soften a bitterness his own errors could not have tended to cure.

When the Basel painting was cut out to be mounted, the last numeral was lost; so that it now stands dated 152-. But all the other facts put it beyond question that the picture could not have been done before 1529.

The baby of 1522 was now the boy of seven, and his successor would seem to have been born during the first months of its father's visit to England, and to be now some eighteen months old.

It may be as well to say here, once for all, as much as need be said of Holbein's family. As already stated, his wife survived him by six years, dying at Basel in 1549. By her first marriage she had one son, Franz Schmidt--who seems to have been a worthy and successful man of trade.

She was the mother of four children by her marriage with Holbein;--Philip, born 1522; Katharina, 1527; Jacob, about 1530; and Kunegoldt, about 1532.

Some years before the painter's death he took Philip Holbein to Paris, and there apprenticed him to the eminent goldsmith, Jerome David, with whom he remained until a couple of years after Holbein's death. Later, he somehow drifted to Lisbon, where he followed his trade until he settled in the old home of his grandfather and great-grandfather, Augsburg. In 1611 his son, Philip Holbein, junior, then "Imperial Court Jeweller" at Augsburg, pet.i.tioned the Emperor Matthias for letters patent to "confirm" his right to certain n.o.ble arms. The claims put forward in this doc.u.ment are utterly at variance with the received belief in Holbein's humble Augsburg origin. Yet the most expert investigators who have carefully studied this subject agree in thinking that this grandson based the genealogical tree on mythical foundations, and therefore planted it remote from Augsburg itself. But be this as it may--and it seems hard to reconcile such discrepancies within a century of the time when both Hans Holbein the Elder and his son were well-known citizens of Augsburg,--the application was successful. Mechel says that this Philip, who claims descent from the renowned "painter of Basel,"

lived in Vienna during his later years; and that a descendant of his again got their patent "confirmed" in 1756, with the right to carry the surname of _Holbeinsberg_; also that this latter descendant was made a Knight of the Empire in 1787, as the n.o.ble _von Holbeinsberg_. So much for the eldest branch, that of Philip Holbein.

The younger boy, Jacob, was a goldsmith in London after Holbein's death.

The evidence seems to show that he was never here previous to that event,--which of itself may have first occasioned his coming, though hardly at the time, as Jacob was not more than thirteen at his father's death. A doc.u.ment in existence proves that he also died in London, about 1552, and apparently unmarried; at which time his elder brother, Philip, was still in Lisbon.

Katharina, the elder daughter, the baby of the Basel painting, seems to have left no descendants. She married a butcher of Basel and died in 1590. And in the same year, very likely from one of the frequent epidemics so fatal to Basel, died Kunegoldt, Elsbeth's youngest child.

The Merian family of Frankfurt-am-Main claims an hereditary right to the artistic gifts of its famous copper-engraver, Mathew Merian, as descendants of Holbein through this daughter Kunegoldt, who, when she died, was the wife of Andreas Syff, a miller, of Basel. According to the greatest authority on this subject, Eduard His, to whose exhaustive researches we owe almost all that is known of Holbein's family, the Merian claims have not, so far, been proved by actual archives; but he is of opinion that there is considerable circ.u.mstantial evidence to support their claim to be lineal descendants of Holbein through the female line.

But in 1529, when the family group was painted, neither Jacob nor Kunegoldt were yet born; and the painter was much more concerned with the anxieties of a living father than with the shadowy cares of an ancestor.

And dark enough was the outlook in Basel, where the Lutheran agitation had, as Erasmus said, "frozen the arts." Before Holbein came back from England many churches had abjured all pictures. The tide of religious antagonism had, as we know, driven both Erasmus and Bonifacius Amerbach for a time to a Catholic stronghold; and had driven their old friend Meyer to do literal battle on behalf of the Church.

Altar paintings were out of the question. And Holbein could but devote himself to designs for the printers and for goldsmiths. Many beautiful compositions for both crafts remain to testify of his matured powers and constant industry. The exquisite designs for dagger-sheaths, in particular, are rightly counted among the treasures of art. But in the summer of 1530 came a commission for the painter's last great work in Basel. This was the long-delayed order for the decoration of that vacant wall in the Council Hall, which adjoined the house _zum Hasen_.

Oddly enough, this commission also came officially through a burgomaster, Jacob Meyer. But the Meyer of 1530, Meyer "of-the-Stag"

(_zum Hirten_), had neither blood nor sentiments in common with the Meyer under whom Holbein had done his first work in the Rathaus. Each headed a party at deadly issue. For the past year Meyer-of-the-Hare had vainly tried to turn back the clock or to stay the iconoclastic fury of the hour. Religious fanaticism had wrecked him as well as every beautiful piece of art on which it could lay its hands. And now at last it mattered nothing any more so far as he was concerned. The dreadful harvests that had brought virtual famine, the earthquake shocks which had unsettled many a mental as well as material foundation, the flooding devastations of the Birsig, the rage of Canton against Canton, the Civil War ready to begin, Pope or Luther come by his own,--it was all one at last to Meyer zum Hasen, who died just as his protege of earlier years was commissioned to paint the blank wall.

But something of his spirit, something of what he himself had been preaching to Basel in warning and threat for years, seems to have pa.s.sed on into the pictures Holbein set before the Council. The paintings, alas! are no more. But a fragment or two and the drawings for them show how truly grand the two works were which Holbein had probably already intended should be his swan-song as Holbein _Basiliensis_. He chose for his subjects Rehoboam's answer to the suffering Israelites: "My little finger shall be thicker than my father's loins; my father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions"; and Samuel prophesying to Saul how dearly he shall learn that "Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness as an iniquity and idolatry."

Both subjects are treated in the Great manner. Rehoboam, leaning forward from his throned seat with flashing eyes, and his little finger seeming actually to quiver in the air, is wonderfully conceived. But the meeting of Samuel and Saul (Plate 26) most splendidly demonstrates how far Holbein towered above mere portraiture when he had the opportunity. To picture this drawing in all the beauty of colour is to realise what we have lost, and what his just fame has lost, with the utter destruction of such works.

Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE 26 _Behold to obey is better than sacrifice_ SAMUEL DENOUNCING SAUL _Washed Drawing. Basel Museum_

Not the greatest of the Italians could have improved upon the distribution and balance of this composition. The blazing background, the sense of a densely crowded host beyond what the eye can grasp, of captives and captors--all the stupendous crackle and roar and shout and sudden strained silence of Saul's immediate followers--is amply matched by those two typical protagonists, just then repeating the old drama with varying fortunes on the world's new stage. The Secular Arm has been short in the service of G.o.d, as interpreted by his Vicar; it has thought, in Saul's person, to win the cause, yet spare its enemies.

Vain is it for him to run with humility, to tell what he has won and what overcome and done. He has not destroyed All--root and branch. For reasons of personal policy, he has given quarter. And the Priest, for G.o.d, will have none of his well-meaning excuses, of his good intentions, his policy, his burnt offerings of half-way measures;--"Behold to obey is better than sacrifice," begins his fierce anathema, "and to hearken than the fat of rams."

Doubtless the Protestant party read its own meanings into these texts, when once the pictures were painted and paid for with seventy-two good guldens. But two very significant facts form their own commentary. One is that the only employment he received from the Council afterward was to redecorate the old Lallenkonig monstrosity on the bridge!--and the other, that as soon as Holbein got his pay for this disgraceful commission, a pay he was now much too hard pressed to refuse, he quietly slipped away from Basel without taking the Council into his confidence.

Judging from his after conduct to his family, he probably left the seventy-two guldens to support his wife and children--now four little ones--until such time as he could send them more from England; and took his way once more, in the late autumn of 1531, with knapsack and paint-brushes for the journey, to a city that might give him few walls to cover, but would certainly not set him to painting the town clock.

Things had changed in London also, and gravely, Holbein found, since he had quitted Sir Thomas More's home at Chelsea with the sketch for Erasmus, in the summer of 1528. He had barely settled himself, in the City this time, before the struggle between Henry VIII. and the English Clergy ended in that Convocation when the latter made its formal "Submission." And in the same month that this took place, Sir Henry Guildford died. Then the three great Acts of Parliament, which swept away the crying abuses of "Benefit of Clergy," resurrected the "dead"

lands (so called because perpetually _aliened in mortmain_) by restoring them to the national circulation of the Sovereign-Will, and turned the rich stream of Annates or "First-Fruits" of the bishoprics from the Pope's coffers to the King's,--were pa.s.sed in this year.

This legislation was followed by the solemn protest and then the death of Archbishop Warham. So that now of that great and close quartet of friends,--Colet, Warham, More, and Erasmus,--there were two on either sh.o.r.e of the last crossing. And More could already see the dark river ahead. His eye marked the consequences of the Acts as keenly as his aged friend Warham had discerned them on his death-bed; and shortly after the "Submission," More resigned his great office as Chancellor.

These seem matters too high to twist the threads of a poor painter's life. But in reality Holbein's career was shaped, from many a year back, by such events as rarely touch the humble individual directly. All his friends and all his patrons in this country were carried far out of reach by 1532; and he must sink or swim, as they in darker waters, according to his own powers. That under such unexpected ill-fortune he did not immediately sink was due to two things--the greatness of his powers, and the circ.u.mstance that a trading-company of Continentals, chiefly German, was seated in London with immense wealth and immense influence at its disposal, and that they were men who knew how to appreciate Holbein at his worth.

The roots of the Steelyard (_Stahlhof_), or "Stilyard," as it is often called in early dramatists, go far back to the legendary centuries of English history. From before the time of Alfred the Great, traders from Germany had cl.u.s.tered together on the bank of the Thames, close to where Cannon Street Station now stands. Amalgamation with the Hanseatic League, and the necessities and grat.i.tude of more than one king of England--but especially of Edward IV.--had made of the Steelyard a company such as only the East India Company of later centuries may be compared to. With the world's new geography and new commercial conditions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its methods and its monopoly of the seas were gradually superseded by the great seamen of the Elizabethan era. But in Holbein's time, though already some of the Hanseatic ships were too overgrown to pa.s.s London Bridge and cast anchor at their own docks just above it, there was scarce a cloud upon the colossal prosperity of the Steelyard.

Its walled and turreted enclosure, able to withstand the fiercest a.s.saults of Wat Tyler's men, stretched from the river northward to Thames Street, and from Allhallows Street on the east to Dowgate Street on the west; and it might well have been described as a German city and port situated in the heart of the City of London. Its ma.s.sive front in Thames Street, where were its three portcullised and fortified gateways with German inscriptions above and the Imperial Double-Eagle high over all, was one of the sights of London. And the Steelyard Tavern was a famous resort. When Holbein knew it well the greatest prelates and n.o.bles and all the Court crowd,--which stretched its gardens and great houses from the stream of the Fleet, just west of the City wall, to Westminster Abbey,--used to flock to this Thames Street corner of the Steelyard to drink Rhenish wine and eat smoked reindeer-tongue and caviar.

Within the gates stood the big Guildhall, which answered both for its councils and its noted banquets. The high carved mantelpieces and wainscotting served admirably to display the glittering plate and strange souvenirs of every known land and sea. On the walls which Holbein's works were so to enrich hung portraits of eminent members of the Guild. The Hall was flanked by the huge stone kitchen and by a strong-tower for the safeguarding of special valuables. In the open s.p.a.ce between the Hall and the west wall of the enclosure was the garden, where trees and flowers and a greenery of vines had been planted in exact imitation of the gardens of the Fatherland. And here sat Holbein among the a.s.sociates, many a time, over their good cheer,--as in the old Basel gardens of the Blume or the Stork in other years, and heard only the German tongue or the songs of home around him.

Away down to the docks ran the lanes of warehouses; shops and booths where every German trader or craftsman in London had his place; and where the merchandise of the world--the greater part of it destined for Lubeck as a centre of European distribution--might be sampled. Here were choicest specimens of the then costly spices of Cathay, or the famous falcons of Norway and Livonia, for which English sportsmen were willing to pay fabulous prices.

As in other guilds, the government of this cosmopolitan beehive was that of a despotic democracy. All the inmates of the precincts were subjected to a rule little short of monastic in its strict discipline. The penalties for any infringement, for drunkenness or dicing or even for an abusive epithet, were very severe. The civic duties of the corporation, too, were sharply defined. In case of war every member had his appointed post in the defence of London. Every "master" had to keep the prescribed accoutrements and arms ready for immediate use, and the repairs and maintenance of the Bishop's Gate were at the sole cost of the Steelyard.

No chapel was erected within its enclosure, the Guild preferring to be incorporated with the adjoining parish of Allhallows. Whether or not there is any truth at the bottom of the ancient tradition that this church had been originally founded by Germans, the Guild maintained its own altar in it in Holbein's time, where Ma.s.ses were said on its own special days and festivals. So far are the facts from the common supposition that the doctrines of Luther would find natural favour in such a community, that the latter only gradually came into the "Church of England" by the same slow processes which transformed the whole parish around it. And when More, who was anything but _Utopian_ himself in the practice of tolerating "heresy" during his chancellorship, headed a domiciliary visit in search of Lutheran writings, he could find nothing but orthodox German Prayer-books and the Scriptures, whose use among laymen he always strenuously advocated; while every member of the community was able to make honest and hearty oath at St. Paul's Cross that no heretic or heretical doctrine would be tolerated amongst them.

Here, then, in this staunch citadel of his own faith, Holbein naturally found a new circle of friends among whom it must have been strangely easy to fancy himself back in the Fischmarkt of his young years, with Froben and Erasmus and Amerbach and Meyer zum Hasen.

The curtain rings up on his work for the Steelyard,--work which covered many years and more fine paintings than could even be enumerated here--with a superlative exhibition of all his powers. The oil portrait of Georg Gyze, or George Gisze, as it is often written, now in the Berlin Gallery (Plate 27), inscribed 1532, has called forth the enthusiastic eulogies of every competent judge. By a piece of rare good fortune it is in perfect preservation. The black of the surcoat alone has lost a little of its first l.u.s.tre; all the rest is as though it had left the easel but the other day.

Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE 27 JoRG (OR GEORGE) GYZE _Oils. Berlin Museum_

The young merchant is seated among his daily surroundings in the Steelyard. He is in the act of leisurely opening a letter addressed, "To the hand of the honourable Jorg Gyze, my brother, in London, England"

(_Dem ersamen herrn Jorg Gyzen zu Lunden in Engelant meinem broder to henden_). The merchant's motto, "No pleasure without care," is chalked up in Latin on the background, with his signature beneath it. Written on a paper stuck higher up is a Latin verse in praise of the portrait; also the date, and the sitter's age--thirty-four. On the racks and shelves are doc.u.ments, books, keys, a watch and seals, and a pair of scales. A gold ball is hanging from above with a lovely chasing in blue enamel; a miracle of painting in itself, to say nothing of the exquisite Venetian gla.s.s, filled with water and carnation-pinks. This flower has its own meaning, and is introduced in more than one of Holbein's portraits. On the rich oriental table-cloth are writing materials also, with account-books, seal and scissors.

Gyze himself is a fair-haired man, wearing a brilliant red silk doublet beneath his black cloak. And the amazing thing is that amidst this bewildering array of pictures--for every article is such in itself, owing to the perfection of its painting--Gyze is not lost or overridden for a moment. It is unmistakably _his_ picture; and he dominates the accessories as much as he did in reality. The man, the whole man, is there; and the things are there around him; that is all. But that the eye recognises this is the demonstration of the painter's own mastership. It is as much Holbein's peculiar secret as are the cool shadows, the luminous glow, the astounding elaboration, all made to express the dignity of one, and but one, theme.

As has been said, the Steelyard portraits are too many to even catalogue here, covering many years. But Gyze's may be taken as their high-water mark. For that matter it could not, in its own way, be surpa.s.sed by any portrait. Holbein himself greatly surpa.s.sed it in the matter of subtle and n.o.ble simplicity, in his two greatest extant pieces of portraiture--the Morett of Dresden and the d.u.c.h.ess of Milan, now in our National Gallery. But in technical powers, and the power of subordinating their very virtuosity to the requirement of a true picture, this was a superlative expression of his matured method.

In the midst of all his fresh London successes came a summons from Basel, which must have made the painter smile a little grimly. It had slowly dawned on the Council that Holbein--whose renown they well knew was a feather in Basel's cap--was proposing to make a prolonged absence.

The result was a decision which the Burgomaster officially conveyed to him. Jacob Meyer zum Hirten wrote to say that Holbein was desired to return immediately to resume the duties of a citizen-artist, and that the Council, anxious to a.s.sist him in the support of his family, had resolved to allow him an annuity of thirty guldens yearly "until something better" could be afforded. Whether he replied in evasive terms, or whether he let the Lallenkonig speak for him, is not on record.

By the time Holbein received this letter, written late in the autumn of 1532, he was plunged into a year of almost incredible activity. The whole of it would hardly seem too long for one such painting as the life-size double portrait--his largest extant portrait-painting--that now belongs to the National Gallery: "The Amba.s.sadors" (Plate 28).

At the extremities of a heavy table, something like a rude dinner-waggon, are two full-length figures which show a curious reflection of his early defect in their want of sufficient height. At the spectator's left stands a richly-costumed individual, whose stalwart proportions, ruddy complexion, and boldly ardent eye denote the perfection of vigorous health, and are in striking contrast to the physique, colouring, and expression of his companion. The former wears a black velvet doublet, which reveals an under-garment of gleaming rose-red satin. Over all is a black velvet mantle lined and trimmed with white fur. On his black cap is a silver brooch which displays a skull. He wears a gold badge exhibiting a mailed figure spearing a dragon suspended by a heavy gold chain. The hilt of his sword is seen at his left hand, and his right grasps a gold-sheathed dagger. On this latter is the inscription: aeT.

SVae. 29; and from it depends a ma.s.sive green-and-gold silk ta.s.sel, incomparably painted.

Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE 28 "THE AMBa.s.sADORS"

_Oils. National Gallery_

As has been noted, the complexion of the man at our right is singularly pallid; the eyes mournfully listless; the skin of his knuckles drawn into the wrinkles of wasting tissues. He wears a scholar's cap and gown; the latter of some chocolate-brown pile, richly patterned, and lined with brown fur. He holds his gloves in his right hand and leans this arm on a closed book, on the edges of which is the lettering: aeTATIS SVae 25.

An oriental cover is spread on the table, and upon it are a number of the scientific instruments common to astrology and to the uses of astronomers like Kratzer, in whose portrait at the Louvre they are also to be seen. On the lower shelf are mathematical and musical instruments and books. The two latter are opened to display their text conspicuously.

Near the man at our left, and kept open by a T-square, is the Arithmetic which Peter Apian, astronomer and globe-maker, published in 1527. It is opened at a page in Division, with its German text plainly legible and identical with the actual page, as seen in the British Museum's copy of this edition.

The book nearest the man at our right, lying beneath the lute, has been also identified as Luther's Psalm-book with music,--in which the German text is by himself and the music by Johann Walther--first published in 1524. Mr. Barclay Squire has shown that the two hymns could not, however, have faced each other in reality, as they do in the painting, without the intervening leaves having been purposely suppressed to gain this end. These hymns are "Come Holy Ghost" (_Kom Heiliger Geyst Herregott_) and "Mortal, wouldst thou live blessedly?" (_Mensch wiltu leben seliglich_). In each case the entire verse is given.

The background is a green-diapered damask curtain most significantly drawn aside to show a silver crucifix high up in the left-hand corner, above the man with the dagger and sword. On the beautiful mosaic pavement is an ugly object that looks like some dried fish. But experiments have shown that the French Sale-Catalogues in which this work first appears in the eighteenth century--first, that is, so far as we can trace it by any records now known--were right in calling this a "skull in perspective"; _i.e._ a skull painted as seen distorted in a convex mirror. Some hint of its true character can be gathered, though not much, by looking at this object from the lower left-hand corner of the painting, when the exaggerated length will be seen to be reduced to something more nearly approaching the height of the usual "Death's Head."

According to the views which are now officially accepted by the National Gallery, the persons of this picture are two French Catholics. The one at our left is Jean de Dinteville, Seigneur of Polisy, Bailly of Troyes and Knight of the French Order of St. Michael, of which he wears the badge without the splendid collar--as was permitted, by a special statute, to persons in the field, on a journey, or in a privacy that would not require the full dress of a state occasion. Jean de Dinteville was French Amba.s.sador at the Court of Henry VIII. in 1533; born in 1504, he was then twenty-nine. He died in 1555.