unable to entirely free itself from this reactionary defect. For with all his astonishing powers, imaginative and technical, he never wholly overcame that defect of making his figures too short and too thick-set for grace, which amounted to a deformity in the full-length figures of his early work, and was due to his fierce revolt from the unnaturally elongated forms of an earlier period.

Yet we should make a grave mistake if we were to regard Holbein as cut off by this reaction from all affinities with the monkish ideals of the Cologne school. On the contrary. We shall see, especially in his religious pictures, how many of those ideals had fed the very springs of his imagination and sunk deep into his art; only expressing themselves in his own symbolism and in forms unlike theirs.

In the Augsburg Gallery there is a painting by Holbein's father, the "Basilica of St. Paul," in which there is a group introduced after the fashion of the period, which has a special biographical interest. This group, in the Baptism of St. Paul, is believed by many authorities to be a portrait-group of the painter himself,—Hans Holbein the Elder, and his two young sons, Ambrose (or Amprosy, as it was often written) and Johannes, or "Hanns." The portrait of the father is certainly like Holbein's own drawing of him in the Duke d'Aumale's Collection, which Sandrart engraved in his account of the younger Holbein; while the heads of the two boys are very like those which we shall find later in a drawing in the Berlin Gallery. From the pronounced way in which his father's hand rests on little Hans' head, while the left points him out,—and even his elder brother "Prosy" shows by his attitude the special notice to be taken of Hans,—it is clear that if this is a portrait-group either it was painted when the boys were actually older, or the younger had already given some astonishing proof of that precocity which his early works display; for in this group the younger boy cannot be more than eight or nine years old.

Hans Holbein the Elder, who stands here with his long brown hair and beard falling over his fur gown, was a citizen of Augsburg, living for a while in the same street with the honoured Augsburg painter, Hans Burgkmair, and occasionally working with him on large commissions. That he was a native of Augsburg, and the son—as is generally believed—of "Michel Holbain" (Augsburg commonly spelt Holbein with an a), leather-dresser—I myself cannot feel so sure as others do. There is no documentary evidence to prove that the Michael Holbein of Augsburg ever had a son, and there is both documentary and circumstantial evidence to prove that the descendants of Hans Holbein the Elder claimed a different origin. That a man was a "citizen," or burgher, of any town, of course proves nothing. It was a period when painters especially learned their trades and practised it in many centres. And this, when guilds were all-powerful and no one could either join one without taking citizenship with it, or pursue its calling in any given place without association with the guild of that place, often involved a series of citizenships. The elder Holbein was himself a burgher of Ulm at one time, if not of other cities in which he worked.

But that Augsburg was his fixed home for the greater part of his life is certain; and the rate-books show that after the leather-dresser had disappeared from their register of residents in the retail business quarter of the city, in the neighbourhood of the Lech canals, Hans Holbein the Elder was, in 1494, a householder in this very place. For some years the name of "Sigmund, his brother," is bracketed with his; but about 1517 Sigmund Holbein established himself in Berne, where he accumulated a very respectable competence, which, at his death in 1540, he bequeathed to his "dear nephew, Hans Holbein, the painter," at that time a citizen of Basel. Sigmund also was a painter, but no unquestioned work of his is known.

There is nothing to show who was the wife of Sigmund Holbein's elder brother, Hans. But by 1499 this elder Hans had either a child or children mentioned with him (sein kind, applying equally to one or more). In all probability this is the earliest discoverable record of Hans Holbein the Younger, and his elder brother Ambrose. In all probability, too, Hans was then about two years old, and "Prosy" a year or two older. At one time it was vaguely thought that the elder Hans had three sons; and Prosy, or "Brosie," as it was sometimes written, got converted into a "Bruno" Holbein. But no vestige of an actual Bruno is to be found. And as Ambrose Holbein's trail, whether in rate-books or art-records, utterly vanishes after 1519, it will be seen that for the most part of the younger Holbein's life he had no brother. Hence it is easy to understand how his uncle Sigmund's Will speaks only of "my dear nephew."

Hans the elder lived far on in his younger son's life. His works attest that he had talents and ideals of no mean order. But I do not propose to enter here upon the vexed question as to how far the "Renaissance" characteristics of the later works attributed to his hand are his own or his son's. Learned and exhaustive arguments have by turns consigned the best of these works to the father, to the son, and back again to the father. In at least one instance of high authority the same writer has, at different periods, held a brief for both sides and for opposite opinions! In this connection, as on the battlefield of some of the son's greatest paintings, the single-minded student of Holbein may not unprofitably draw three conclusions from the copious literature on the subject:—First, that a working hypothesis is not of necessity the right one; secondly, that in the matter of his pronouncements the critical expert also may occasionally be regarded as

Un animal qui s'habille, déshabille et babille toujours;

and thirdly, that in default of incontestable documentary proofs the modest "so far as I have been able to discover" of Holbein's first biographer, Van Mander, is a capital anchor to windward, and is at any rate preferable to driving forth upon the howling waters of Classification, like Constance upon the Sea of Greece, "Alle sterelesse, God wot."

But my chief reason for not pursuing the Protean phantom of Holbein's Augsburg period is that,—apart from my own disagreement with many accepted views about the works it includes, and the utter lack of data for determining any position irrefutably,—it is comparatively unimportant to the purpose of this little book. For wherever the younger painter was born,—whether at Augsburg or Ulm or elsewhere,—and whatever I believe to be his rightful claim to such paintings as the St. Elizabeth and St. Barbara of the St. Sebastian altar-piece at Munich, Fame, like Van Mander, has rightly written him down Holbein Basiliensis.

It is true that his father's brushes were his alphabet. It may be true, though I doubt it, that his father's teaching was his only technical school. But if he was, as to the last he gloried in being, the child of the Old Period, he was much more truly the immediate pupil of the Van Eycks than of his father's irresolute ideals; while Basel was his university. And whatever may have been his debt to those childish years when the little Iulus followed his father with trembling steps, his debt to Basel was immensely greater. The door-sill of Johann Froben's printing-house was the threshold of his earthly immortality.

When he turned his back on the low-vaulted years of Augsburg, it was because for him also the time was ripe. The Old Period had cast his