(In the Imperial Gallery, Vienna)
Research has not availed to identify this man, who sits at a table,
book in hand, though he has a commanding personality. Few artists
have left more portraits beyond the reach of identification
than has Holbein. Other remarkable but unnamed studies are to
be found in Basle and Darmstadt, at the Berlin Royal Museum,
at Windsor Castle, and elsewhere.
[Illustration]
Apart from this work, we look to Holbein for a long roll of kings,
princes, churchmen, statesmen, doctors, lawyers, men of letters,
reformers, and social celebrities all in their habit as they lived,
and vested with the dignity that seems to have been an integral part of
the Tudor period. It would seem to have been a curiously practical and
business-like age, with rather less imagination than we associate with
Elizabethan times. In dealing with one and all of his varied sitters,
the painter seems to have preserved the essential characteristics,
and, if we must admit the Holbein touch, there is at least no Holbein
type. He started his work under the influence of the Renaissance, and
with an almost childish delight in decorative effects. As he progressed
he threw aside one by one the details that he had ceased to regard as
essential, until in the end he could express everything he saw in the
simplest possible manner, without any suggestion of superfluity or
redundancy, without concession to the merely superficial side of
picture-making that stood lesser men in good stead. 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. But the study of these sketches themselves
avails to explain much; and as there are more than eighty of them at
Windsor, and these have been reproduced very finely in several volumes,
the lover of Holbein has no occasion to leave this country in order to
understand the technique of this branch of the master's work. 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. What manner of man he was, how and when he lived and died,
is, as we have hinted already, a matter of conjecture; and in setting
down the facts of his life that are generally accepted, it is necessary
to admit reservations at short intervals. Of course, we would give much
to know the full story of his progress, to learn the conditions under
which some of his most notable achievements were accomplished, to catch
some really reliable glimpses of his domestic life, but in all these
matters we have nothing but stray facts and countless conjectures.
Even the portrait in Basle that is said to stand for him is a doubtful
authority, because it is not clear from the original inscription
whether it is of Holbein or by Holbein. We know that he painted it,
but we do not know whether he was painting himself. Happily, perhaps,
the satisfaction of this curiosity, though it be human and reasonable
enough, is not of the first importance. 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 quality and their power to
teach as well as to charm succeeding generations.