HANS HOLBEIN.
Contemporary with Dürer lived another great artist, Hans Holbein. He was born at Augsburg, in 1497. Comparing him with Albrecht Dürer, Kugler says that “as respects grandeur and depth of feeling, and richness of his invention and conception in the field of ecclesiastical art, he stands below the great Nuremberg painter. Though not unaffected by the fantastic element which prevailed in the Middle Ages, Holbein shows it in his own way.” What we know of Holbein’s life must be told briefly. He was painting independently, and for profit, when only fifteen. He was only twenty when he left Augsburg and went to Bâle. There he painted his earliest known works, which still remain there. In 1519, after a visit to Lucerne, we find him a member of the Guild of Painters at Bâle, and years later he was painting frescoes for the walls of the Rathaus—frescoes which have yielded to damp and decay, and of which fragments only remain. These are in the Museum of Bâle, as well as eight scenes from “The Passion,” which belong to the same date. Doubtless Holbein had gone to Bâle poor, and in search of any remunerative work. It is said that he and his brother Ambrose visited that city with the hope of finding employment in illustrating books, an art for which Bâle was famous. Hans Holbein was destined, however, to find a new home and new patrons. In 1526, Holbein went to England. The house of Sir Thomas More, in Chelsea, received him, and there he worked as an honored guest—painting portraits of the ill-fated Chancelor and his family. Of other portraits painted at this time that of “Sir Bryan Tuke,” treasurer of the king’s chamber, now in the collection of the Duke of Westminster, and that of “Archbishop Warham,” in the Louvre, are famous specimens. Having returned to Bâle for a season, hard times forced Holbein to seek work once more in England. This was in 1532, when he was taken into the service of Henry VIII., a position not without its dangers. He was appointed court-painter at a salary of thirty-four pounds a year, with rooms in the palace. The amount of this not very magnificent stipend is proved from an entry in a book at the Chamberlain’s office, which, under the date of 1538, contains these words: “Payd to Hans Holbein, Paynter, a quarter due at Lady Day last, £8 10s. 9d.”
Holbein was employed to celebrate the marriage of Anne Boleyn by painting two pictures in tempera in the Banqueting Hall of the Easterlings, at the Steelyard. He chose the favorite subjects for such works, “The Triumph of Riches,” and “The Triumph of Poverty.” The pictures probably perished in the Great Fire of London. In 1538, Holbein was engaged on a very delicate mission, considering the matrimonial peculiarities of his royal master. He was sent to Brussels to paint the “Portrait of Christina,” widow of Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, whom Henry would have made his queen, had she been willing. Soon after, having refused an earnest invitation from Bâle to return there, Holbein painted an aspirant to the royal hand, Anne of Cleves. Perhaps the painter flattered the lady; at all events the original was so distasteful to the king that he burst into a fit of rage which cost Thomas Cromwell his head. Holbein continued his work as a portrait painter, and has left us many memorials of the Tudor Court. He died in 1543, of the plague, but nothing is known of his burial place. Some time before his death we hear of him as a resident in the parish of St. Andrew Undershaft, in the city.
The fame of this great master rests almost entirely upon his power as a portrait painter. In the collection of drawings at Windsor, mostly executed in red chalk and Indian ink, we are introduced to the chief personages who lived in and around the splendid court in the troublous times of the second Tudor.
JOHANN FRIEDRICH OVERBECK.
After the death of Dürer and Holbein the German school did not long hold its supremacy. Its decline was rapid, and not until the present century was there a re-awakening. Johann Friedrich Overbeck, the chief of the revivalists of German art, was born at Lübeck, in 1789. When about eighteen years of age he went to Vienna, to study painting in the academy of that city. The ideas on art which he had carried with him were so entirely new and so little agreeable to the professors of the academy, that they met with but small approval. On the other hand, there were several among his fellow-pupils who gladly followed his lead; and in 1810, Overbeck, accompanied by a small band of youthful artists, went to Rome, where he established the school which was afterward to become so famous.
Overbeck, who was professor of painting in the Academy of St. Luke, a foreign member of the French Institute, and a member of all the German academies, died at Rome in 1869, at the advanced age of eighty years. He painted both in fresco and in oil. Of his productions in fresco, the most noteworthy are a “Vision of St. Francis” in Santa Maria degli Angeli, at Assisi, and five scenes from Tasso’s “Jerusalem Delivered,” in the villa of the Marchese Massimo, in Rome. Of his oil paintings, the best are the “Triumph of Religion in the Arts,” in the Städel Institute at Frankfort; “Christ on the Mount of Olives,” at Hamburg; the “Entrance of Christ into Jerusalem,” painted in 1816 for the Marien Kirche, at Lübeck; and a “Descent from the Cross,” at Lübeck. Overbeck also executed a number of small drawings. Of these we may mention forty designs of the “Life of Christ,” and many other Biblical subjects.
THE SCHOOL OF THE NETHERLANDS.
In the Netherlands, we find before the seventeenth century, two schools of art; that of Bruges, whose most famous painters were the brothers Van Eyck, and that of Antwerp, whose founder, Matsys, did some fine work. It was not until the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, that art in the Netherlands attained its full strength and life. The artist to whom the revival was due was Peter Paul Rubens. He was born on the day of the festival of St. Peter and St. Paul—the 29th of June, 1577, at Siegen, in Westphalia. His father was a physician, who being suspected of Protestant proclivities, had been forced to flee from his native town of Antwerp, and was subsequently imprisoned, not without cause, by William of Orange, whose side he had joined. When Peter Paul was a year old, his parents removed to Cologne, where they remained for nine years, and then on the death of her husband, the mother of Rubens returned with her child to Antwerp. Young Rubens was sent to a Jesuit school, doubtless in proof of his mother’s soundness in the faith of Rome, and studied art. Fortunately for the world, Rubens possessed too original a genius to be much influenced by his masters. He visited Italy in 1600, where the coloring of the Venetians exercised a great influence upon the young painter, and we may consider Paolo Veronese as the source of inspiration from which Rubens derived the richness of his tints. In 1601 we find Rubens in the service of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua, an enthusiastic patron of art, and two years later he was sent to Philip III. of Spain, on an “artistic commission,” some secret mission, perhaps, but certainly as the bearer of costly presents. On his return from Spain he passed some time in Mantua, Rome, and Genoa; the dramatic power of his pictures he derived probably from Michelangelo, as he had learned richness of coloring from Veronese, and we can trace the influence of Giulio Romano, whose works he must have studied at Mantua.
Rubens settled in Antwerp, and married in 1609 his first wife, Isabella Brandt. Always popular, and always successful, Rubens founded a school of painting in Antwerp, which was soon crowded with pupils. His life, however, was destined to be full of action and movement. In 1620 he went to Paris at the invitation of Marie de Medicis, then living in the Luxembourg Palace. The work which the widowed queen proposed to Rubens was to decorate two galleries, the one with scenes from her own history, the other with pictures from the life of Henri IV.