character. Cheseman, who is forty-eight, wears a silk doublet of purplish-red, with the customary black overcoat trimmed with fur. His curly hair is beginning to turn gray. He holds a hooded hawk on his gloved left hand, and strokes its feathers with his right. The bird is splendidly painted, and the keen, piercing eyes and clean-cut face of its master are wonderfully rendered. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who noted it during his travels in Holland, speaks of it as “admirable for its truth and precision, and extremely well coloured.”
This picture is called erroneously in all the books “Henry VIII.’s Falconer,” but he was a person of much more importance. Robert Cheseman, of Dormanswell, near Norwood, in Middlesex, and Northcote, in Essex, was a man of wealth, and one of the leading commoners of his county. He was born in 1485, son and heir of Edward Cheseman, Cofferer and Keeper of the Wardrobe to Henry VII., and succeeded to the family estates in 1517. He was made a Justice of the Peace for Middlesex in 1528, and during his life served on a number of commissions for collecting tithes, subsidies, and so on. In 1530 he was one of the commissioners on an inquiry into the possessions of Thomas Wolsey after he was attainted, and was on the Grand Jury at the trials of Sir Geoffrey Pole and others (1538), and Thomas Culpeper and Francis Dereham for treason (1541). He was one of the gentlemen selected to welcome Anne of Cleves when she first landed in England, and was, in fact, one of some half-dozen men of position who represented Middlesex on such public occasions. In 1536 he supplied thirty men for the army against the Northern rebels, so that he must have been a man of substance. He married Alice, daughter of Henry Dacres, of Mayfield, Staffordshire, a Merchant Tailor and Alderman of London. These curtailed biographical notes are inserted here, as they have not been previously published.
A small work of great beauty in Hampton Court Palace, representing Mary Magdalen at the Sepulchre, sometimes called Noli Me Tangere, is of unusual value to English students, as being the only sacred painting by Holbein now in this country. It has darkened greatly with age, and has suffered other damage, but is considered by most judges to be an undoubted original by the master, although Dr. Woltmann attributed it to Bartholomew Bruyn, of Cologne.
Both in treatment and in feeling this picture is very similar to the altar-piece of the Passion, in eight compartments, in the Basle Museum, and must have been painted about the same time, between 1520 and 1527. In sentiment it is one of the most poetical of Holbein’s compositions, and an admirable example of his rendering of light and shade in his first Basle period. “The early morning when it was yet dark” is most successfully suggested in the painting of the landscape background. Dawn is just breaking over the sky and distant Calvary, while the foreground is still in darkness, except for the light which radiates from the open sepulchre, where
the two angels can be seen seated at the head and the foot of the empty grave. Mary, who holds a cup of spikenard in her left hand, has turned round hastily in eager surprise, and stretches out her right hand towards the Saviour. Our Lord draws back from her, saying, “Touch Me not!” The dramatic action of the two figures is most expressive. In the background the two disciples, who have been before her at the sepulchre, are seen hastening away. Peter, still dubious as to the truth of the Resurrection, is talking eagerly and with animated gestures as he expresses his doubts; but John, who “saw and believed,” turns back his head in reproach at a comrade who can doubt even for a moment. The composition, as a whole, is marked by a simple but impressive dignity.
It seems almost certain that the first portrait painted by Holbein in England was that of Sir Thomas More. Mr. Huth’s finished portrait, a half-length of the Chancellor, is dated 1527. There are two studies for More’s head among the Windsor drawings almost identical. They are life-size, three-quarter face, looking to the right, with black cap and fur collar, done with black and red chalk. The drawing reproduced here is 16 inches high by 12 inches wide, and has been pricked for tracing. Holbein sketched the members of the More family on a larger scale than was usual with him, and all these drawings were preliminary studies for the large family group now lost, or hidden under the paint of some feebler contemporary artist in the Nostell Priory version of the picture. In these two drawings, in Mr. Huth’s portrait, and in the large sketch for the family group now at Basle, Sir Thomas is represented in the same position, so that it is probable he only gave one sitting to the artist.
This drawing is masterly, and is a splendid example of how easily Holbein seized upon the leading characteristics of a face and with a few swift strokes fixed them for our admiration for ever. In his youth More had been handsome, and, according to Erasmus, was of a fair complexion, with dark-brown hair and gray eyes. His firmly-compressed lips and his penetrating glance give to his face a sternness which he seldom displayed, except in his detestation of heretics; but fine judgment and nobility of feeling, and that mental harmony which springs from inward peace, are the leading characteristics in his face as the artist has drawn it for us here. One can see at a glance that here was a man who would always be just in his dealings with others, and unchangeable in carrying out what he knew to be his duty—a student and a man of deep learning, and yet a man of affairs and of the world, trusted by his King and admired by his equals, and losing his head on the block through his invincible honesty. Erasmus well said of him: “He possesses that beautiful ease of mind, or, still better, that piety and prudence, with which he joyfully adapts himself to everything that comes, as though it were the best that could come.”