The Ambassadors and the Courtiers
Holbein painted the picture of the French ambassadors and showed one of them in particular, Charles de Solier (as the book names him, though the double portrait known as The Ambassadors shows other men), in his official dress and badge with complete care and skill. Four other pictures were portraits of Sir Henry Guildford (the king's comptroller), Sir Nicholas Carew (his master of the horse), Robert Cheseman (his falconer) and Dr. John Chambers (his physician): men whose thick hides could bear living close to that fiery king without being burned. About 1537 Holbein too became one of them and was appointed court painter. He was given a private studio in the palace of Whitehall, sank into comfort, and dressed in colored silks.
His new commissions included decorating rooms, designing ceremonial dress, book covers, weapons, tableware, seals, buttons and belt clasps for the king, and the jewels that Henry gave to his wives. In 1538 the king sent him to Brussels to paint the Danish princess Christina. The portrait of Christina of Denmark turned out beautiful, and Henry became eager to marry her; but the princess chose instead Duke Francis of Lorraine as her husband, perhaps because she preferred a safer marriage. Holbein took the opportunity to look in at Basel, fixed an annual allowance of 40 guilders for his wife, and returned to London at once. Soon afterward he was commissioned to paint the portrait of Anne of Cleves; and in the sad eyes of that portrait, now in the Louvre, Holbein had almost foreseen the unhappy outcome for its subject.
The King in Paint
He made several large pictures of the king himself, almost all now lost. One survives in the Barber-Surgeons' Hall in London, Henry VIII Granting the Charter to the Barber-Surgeons, in which Henry in his ceremonial dress rules the whole scene. Holbein also painted charming portraits of Jane Seymour, Henry's third wife, and Catherine Howard, his fifth (the identification of the latter is uncertain). When Henry himself sat or stood as Holbein's model, the painter rose to the challenge and put his utmost effort into masterly likenesses. Among all his works only the portraits he made of Erasmus, now in the Louvre and in Basel, surpassed his portraits of the king. The portrait of 1536 shows the monarch with the swagger and massiveness of the Teutons.
Henry, in spite of himself, liked that picture and commissioned Holbein to paint the royal family on a wall of Whitehall Palace. This fresco was lost in the fire of 1698, but a copy made in 1667 for Charles II reveals the masterly design of the original. At upper left stands Henry VII with a look full of faith and humility; a little lower, his son Henry VIII holds the signs of power and plants his feet apart like a gigantic statue; at the right are his mother and his third wife; and in the center is a marble tablet on which the virtues of kings were recorded in detail in Latin. The figure of Henry VIII looked so alive that a legend spread that anyone entering the room mistook the painting for the king himself. In 1540 Holbein again painted a still more awe-inspiring picture of the king, Henry VIII in Wedding Dress; and last (1542) he showed Henry in mental and physical decline on another canvas. Nemesis, goddess of retribution, took her time in this case and, instead of a swift, clean death, gave Henry VIII a long, wretched decay.
Two lovely pictures added to the credit of the royal gallery: one a portrait of Prince Edward at two years old, all innocence, and the other of the same prince at six (Metropolitan Museum). The second especially delights the eye. We can grasp Holbein's mastery when we remember that within a year or two he could with a firm hand show the father's proud presence, and then, with mysterious skill, record the son's tenderness and submission on canvas.
The Last Years
At forty-five (1542) the painter made his own portrait again with the same realism with which he had described the king: a suspicious and combative face, hair and beard tousled and turning white. The next year he painted himself again, this time with a gentler expression, in a round frame. That same year (1543) plague reached London and chose him as one of its victims.
Holbein's Art Assessed
As to technique, Holbein was one of the eminent painters. He saw with scrupulous exactness and showed with the same exactness. Every line, color or expression, every small incident or change of light that might be the source of an effect or quality, was recorded by his pen and set down on paper, linen, wood or plaster. What precision in drawing lines, what depth, softness and warmth in color, what skill in arranging scattered elements into a single composition! But in many cases, when Holbein's aim was not to paint a subject but to make money, the sympathy and intuition that reached to the depths of the human soul were absent: that very quality which was at work in the portraits of Erasmus at the Louvre and in Basel, or in the picture of his own family. Except in the Meyer Madonna, we do not see in Holbein's works that spirituality which raises the realism of a painter like Jan van Eyck, in a work such as the Adoration of the Lamb, to so lofty and heavenly a level. Holbein's indifference to religion kept him from rising to the grandeur of a painter like Grunewald, and also kept him away from Durer, who always kept one foot in the Middle Ages. Holbein worked neither in the Renaissance way, like Titian, nor in the way of the Reformation age, like Cranach. He represented the practical sense and realistic quality of the German, Dutch, Flemish and English. It might be said that his success and fame prevented the strong influence of the principles of Italian delicacy in painting from entering England.
After his death, Puritanism overcame the enthusiasm of the Elizabethan age, and English painting declined until Hogarth stepped onto the field. At about the same time greatness departed from the German school of painting. A wave of barbarism had to pass over central Europe before the call of the love of beauty could be raised there again.