(In the Imperial Gallery, Vienna)
This portrait is one of the masterpieces of the Vienna Gallery.
The queen is painted almost life size, and wears a dark red dress
over a petticoat of silver brocade. The marvellous complexion for
which she was noted and the fine jewels she wore are rendered
with rare skill by the painter.
[Illustration]
Unfortunately history has nothing to tell us of the boyhood of young Hans,
though we may gather that his father was in straitened circumstances and
not on the best of terms with members of his family who were better off
than he. Perhaps we may assume that the _res angusta domi_ turned young
Han's steps from his father's house while he was yet little more than a
boy, for when he could have been no more than seventeen, and was perhaps
younger, he and his brother Ambrosius would seem to have left Augsburg
for Basle, where so much of his work is to be found to-day. Here in
his first youth he painted a rather poor Madonna and Christ, which was
discovered little more than thirty years ago after centuries of neglect,
and is remarkable chiefly for the tiny Renaissance cherubs on the frame,
figures painted with so much freshness, ease, and vigour that one is
inclined to overlook the poor quality of the picture they enshrine. It
would seem that at the time when this work was painted the elder Holbein
had taken his family from Augsburg to Lucerne, and that he was at once
admitted to the Painters' Guild there.
It was well for Holbein that he selected Basle as a place of residence,
for the chances of his life threw him at a very impressionable age into
the company of men who found a fresh field for his talents, and widened
very considerably the scope of his achievement. He was not destined to
remain constant to painting.
In 1515 Frobenius and Amerbach the great printers were at Basle,
Erasmus had been and gone, and Frobenius must have been attracted by
some of the clever sensational work with which Holbein made his artistic
debut, for when the third edition of the famous "Breve ad Erasmum" was
published by Frobenius, the title-page was designed by Holbein. He was
not turning his attention to this class of work to the detriment of
others, for we associate with the stay in Basle some half-dozen of the
second-rate efforts in paint of a man who is striving to find himself
and is at the stage in his life where he is little more than the echo
of greater men who have influenced him. Holbein was already a man of
all art work; he prepared the title-page of Sir Thomas More's "Utopia,"
and painted religious pictures or table tops with equal assurance and
facility. He was never one of the young men with a mission who shun
delights and live laborious days working from dawn to dusk in pursuit
of an ideal, and wake one morning to find Fame has arrived overnight.
And yet on a sudden he found himself, as his sketches for the portrait
of Jacob Meier and Dorothea Kannegiesser testify. Darmstadt and Dresden
hold the ripe fruits of his friendship with Jacob Meier, and it would
seem that his earliest commission there served to bring him the measure
of inspiration that lifts uncertain talent to the height of a great
achievement, never to fall back to the ranks of those who struggle year
in year out, achieving nothing of permanent value. Certainly he was well
served by his sitters, for the man and the woman seem to have been born
to be painted.