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 genius; the New was to expand it to new powers and purposes.

Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year's dwelling for the new;
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretch'd in his last-found home and knew the old no more.

It may easily have been the elder Hans' continuous troubles, whether due to his fault or his misfortune it is idle now to inquire, which made his sons leave Augsburg. Certain it is that he but escaped from the clutches of one suit for debt after another in order to tumble into some fresh disaster of the sort, until his own brother Sigmund appears among his exasperated creditors. After 1524 Hans Holbein the Elder vanishes from the records. Probably, therefore, it was at about this date that he paid,—Heaven and himself only knowing how willingly,—the one debt which every man pays at the last.

At all events his sons did leave Augsburg about 1514; or, at any rate, Hans did, since there is a naïve little Virgin and Child in the Basel Museum, dated 1514, which must have been painted in the neighbourhood of Constance in this year,—probably for the village church where it was discovered. As everything points to the conclusion that Holbein was born in 1497, he would have been some seventeen years old at this time, and "Prosy" eighteen or nineteen. Substantially, therefore, they must have looked pretty much as in the drawing which their father had made of them three years before; that precious drawing in silver-point which is now in the Berlin Collection ([Plate 2]). Over the elder, still with the curly locks of the group in the "St. Paul Basilica," is written Prosy; over the younger, Hanns. The age of the latter, fourteen, may still be deciphered above his portrait, but that of Ambrose has quite vanished. Between the two is the family name, written in Augsburg fashion, Holbain. At the top of the sheet stands the year of the drawing, almost illegible, but believed to be 1511.

PLATE 2.
"PROSY" AND "HANNS" HOLBAIN
[Drawn by their father, Hans Holbein the elder]
Silver-point. Berlin Cabinet
Click to [ENLARGE]