a small shelf, and on one of the volumes is the date 1523, and a half-effaced Latin distich, in which Holbein’s name can still be read. The philosopher, turned slightly to the left, is gazing in front of him, deep in thought.
Mr. Claude Phillips has admirably described this picture (Art Journal, April, 1897). He says: “Holbein has rarely painted with a more exquisite subtlety or a firmer grip of his subject than here. The modelling of the head and hands is perfect in its searching truth and fine balance, showing none of that exaggeration and hardness of facial detail which so often mars the pictorial and obscures the intellectual conceptions in the portraits of Albrecht Dürer. Bodily suffering and advancing age have a little extinguished physical energy, but yet the great scholar of Rotterdam appears here surely but undemonstratively portrayed in his true character. He was the chief representative of the broader humanism in the Reformation, the one man able to look calmly at the world as it was—able to weigh, to judge, but also to show toleration—that is, provided his own comfort and security were not thereby interfered with.”
The Louvre example, showing Erasmus writing, in profile, is smaller and richer in colour than the Longford example, and even more searching in its rendering of truth and character.
The superb portrait of Georg Gisze, member of the Hanse League and the London Steelyard, painted in 1532, shortly after Holbein’s return to England, and now in the Berlin Gallery, is finer in its colour and more delicate in the rendering of its details than any other of the Steelyard portraits done by the artist about this time. It is almost Flemish in the minuteness and care of its finish and its clear colour, and seems to have had unusual pains bestowed upon it, perhaps as a kind of show-piece to tempt other sitters.
The young merchant is shown in his office, behind a table covered with a cloth of Eastern design, with the various objects that he requires in his business scattered in front of him and about the room. Among them is a graceful Venetian glass holding carnations. Papers and letters are fastened to the walls, one of which he is just opening, upon which can be read the address: “To the honourable Georg Gisze, my brother, in London, England.” On the wall hangs a paper with his motto: “Nulla sine merore voluptas.” He has fair hair, and is dressed in red, with black cap and overcoat, and a white shirt with a collar of Spanish work. All the accessories, whether of silk, or linen, or gold, or steel, or glass, are painted with a fidelity to nature never excelled by the Dutchmen or Flemings of the following century, who devoted their whole career to the rendering of still-life. In Holbein’s work, however, this elaboration of detail is soon forgotten in the fascination which the vivid representation of the sitter’s personality produces in the spectator and the power displayed by the artist in seizing the essentials of a character.
