It was in this very year, 1536, that he received his commission to paint Anne Boleyn's successor, Jane Seymour, then on the throne the block had left vacant. The Vienna Gallery possesses this painting, of which another version is at Woburn Abbey, and the chalk drawing at Windsor (Plate 30).

PLATE 30.
QUEEN JANE SEYMOUR
Oils. Vienna Gallery
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The Queen was noted for her milk-white fairness, and Holbein has borrowed the pearly shadows of the lily in rendering it. The figure is a little under life-size. Her head-dress and robes of silver brocade and royal velvet are studded with splendid rubies and pearls to match the jewels on her neck and breast. The hands are as full of character as of art.

The Queen's portrait may properly be said to belong to the great wall painting which Holbein finished in 1537 for the Royal Palace at Whitehall. But before that date the painter's inner life had suffered one more great wrench. At midnight of July 12th, 1536, Erasmus died in the home that had been his own, except for the Freiburg interval, ever since John Froben's death in 1526; a death that had probably had much to do with Holbein's first departure from Basel. That event had uprooted the scholar from the old house zum Sessel, in the Fischmarkt, and transplanted him to the home of Froben's son, Hieronymus. The latter house, then known as zum Luft, is now No. 18, Bäumleingasse. And it was here that Erasmus passed away, his mind keeping to the last its humour and its interests in all around him. But no one, remembering how Fisher and More had died in the preceding year, can doubt but that the good old man was very willing to be gone, away from changed faces and changed ways—though Bonifacius Amerbach and young Froben were as sons to him.

Basel, for all her differences with him, buried Erasmus with great honours. But no tablet could so commemorate him as the noble monument which Holbein built to him in the title-page he designed for Hieronymus Froben's edition of Erasmus's Works, published in 1540. It is a woodcut of extraordinary beauty. The full-length figure of the scholar stands in cap and gown, with one hand resting lightly on the bust of the god Terminus (the god of immovable boundary lines, significantly conjoined to Erasmus's chosen motto: Concedo nulli) and the other calling attention to this significant emblem of fixed convictions. Not even the Louvre oil painting expresses the whole Erasmus quite so completely or so nobly as this little drawing of the man whom Holbein had loved and revered for twenty years; and to whom he owed, in the first place, the splendid opportunities of his career in England.

And as he drew it, what ghosts of his own Past must have clustered around the lean little figure! What echoes and visions! The Rhine, the gardens, the clang of the press, the Fischmarkt, the friendly smiles at Froben's and Meyer's firesides; his marriage; the stars and dews and perfume of all his dreams in the years—those matchless years of a man's young manhood—when he had walked with angels as well as peasants, had seen the Way of the Cross, the Christ in the Grave, and the Risen Lord even more clearly than the faces of flesh and blood. Eheu fugaces! "God help thee, Elia, how art thou sophisticated."

Ah, well! Those years, and the darker, sadder years that had led far from them, were now like his oldest friends—dead and buried. The Holbein of 1537 was painting the King of England on the wall of his Privy Chamber. There was a place for honest pride as well as for honest regret in his thoughts.

This painting perished with the palace in the fire of 1698. Charles II., however, had a small copy of it made by Leemput. And a portion of Holbein's original cartoon ([Plate 31]) in chalk and Indian ink, is in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire—the face much washed out by cleaning, and the outline pricked for transferring to the wall. The figures are life-size, but Walpole has already noticed how the massive proportions and solidly-planted pose of the King heighten the illusion of a Colossus. Behind him stands the admirably contrasted figure of Henry VII. The whole composition consisted of four portraits; Queen Jane Seymour opposite her husband, and the King's mother opposite to, and on a level with, Henry VII., who stands on the elevation of the background.

PLATE 31.
KING HENRY VIII AND HIS FATHER
(Fragment of Cartoon used for the Whitehall Wall-Painting)
Duke of Devonshire's Collection
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