Wolsey and the great and quietly-handled Archbishop Warham hang here together in strange posthumous amity, parted only by the panel of Anne, Bluebeard's fourth Queen, which Holbein went to Cleves to paint. A very undistinguished person No. 108 must have been, quite worthy of her safe suburban pensioner's life, and the humorous commuting title of the King's Sister. All her forerunners and successors are here to the life, limned by Holbein's brush and pencil. The dearth of female beauty, from 1509 to 1547, was truly extraordinary, if we are to believe the believable pigments before us. The women of the court have the fullest possible representation, with the adjunct of exceptionally picturesque, though stiff, attire. But among them all, it would be a hard task to bestow the apple upon the belle, for a reason quite other than any known to Paris on Ida. Even Anne Boleyn, full-lipped and gay, has but an upper-housemaid prettiness. It is small compensation that most of them were learned. The best female portrait, admirably hung, is No. 92: the young Duchess of Milan, in Holbein's latest and largest manner. The demure girl, set in novel blacks and whites of her widow's mourning, posed with consummate simplicity, has always an admiring crowd in front of her. Wornum's critical last word echoes: it is "a stupendous picture." But the Duchess might be Lancelot Gobbo's sweetheart, so far as the actual bearing and expression are concerned. No wonder that the fright Gloriana passed for all that was comely and thoroughbred! Could it be that her subjects had no loftier criterion in the memory of their own mothers?
The fine flower of the picture department of the Tudor Exhibition is the Queen's loan from Windsor Library: eighty-nine drawings on tinted paper, ranged on the screens of the West and South Galleries. Queen Caroline, in George the Second's time, found them in a Kensington Palace cupboard, and had them framed. (We know nothing else so nice of that bore of a martyr.) Behold Holbein's methods running free! In decisive and rapid chalk lines, with a mere suggestion of color, or a touch, here and there, of India ink, he gives us his English contemporaries: some in playful perfection commended to posterity, as a matter of a dozen conscientious touches. How he delights in a hollow cheek, a short silken beard, an outstanding ear, or the hair sprouting oddly on the temples! Despite his uncompromising truth of locality, the result is often of astounding delicacy: notably in the heads of Lords Clinton and Vaux, and that of Prince Edward. Most of these Windsor sheets are studies for pictures; and thus we have Holbein's splendid roll of familiar faces over again; but that of Sir John Godsalve is complete, and in body-colors, of grand breadth and tone. The catalogue names were affixed much later, and are not perfectly trustworthy: but those indicated as Sir Harry Guilford, the Russells, Earls of Bedford, the Howards, Lord Wentworth, Sir Thomas Eliott, and John Poins (the latter overbrimming with individual force), lead in interest and technique. No. 514, the scholarly and lovable Eliott, is perhaps the thing one would choose, of all here, to win Holbein the admiration of those who have yet to appreciate him. Its refined finish and bold conception are in unique balance. Sir Thomas Eliott, in half profile, is grave and plain. But whoever likes to pay homage to intelligent human goodness, will delight in this report of him. You feel that Rembrandt would have turned from his cloudless, treeless table-land of a countenance; and that such as Sir Peter Lely would have found him cryptic enough, and so smothered him in ultramarine draperies. But among Holbein's men, after the Jörg Gyze (1532) in the Museum at Berlin, the Hubert Morett in the Dresden Gallery (1537), and the Young Man with a Falcon (1542) in the Gallery of the Hague, after his immortal major achievements, in short, one might rank this little unshaded frost-fine drawing of Sir Thomas Eliott, a sitter placed forever on this side of death.
But the ladies, again, in their close bodices and triangular head-dresses, generally come off second-best. Holbein's elemental candor befitted them not. Failing to be themselves in full, they are more or less Elisabeth-Schmiddy! tinctured with reminiscences of the artist's muddy-tempered Hausfrau at home in Basle. The one quality they cannot convey is breeding, social distinction. Holbein's woman may have youth, goodness, capacity, even authority; but
"Was the lady such a lady?"
You miss the aroma of manners. The mystery of sex is absent, too: a thing the Florentines never missed, and which Gainsborough and Romney found it impossible not to convey. When you see Holbein's men, you wish you had known them; but his women merely remind you that he was a very great painter. It is well to remember, nevertheless, that he had no very great woman to paint: no such patroness, for instance, as "Anne, Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery." His organ-hand does what it can for souls frangible as lutes. Wherever there is sincerity, kindness, or a brave soul, wherever there is sagacity or thought in these Tudor faces, their delineator makes it tell. Did the she-visionaries, if there were any rich enough to engage Holbein, did the persons born in Hawthorne's "brown twilight atmosphere," habitually avoid his studio? No kirtled aristocracy of any age or country was ever so flat and dozy. Surrey occupied himself in scorning "the new men" of his day; and it is conceivable that new men abounded, to fill the places depopulated by the Wars of the Roses, when all that was gallant and significant in the upper ranks, seemed, in one way or another, to have gone under. But the Wars of the Roses touched not the female succession in the ducal and baronial houses: and the wonder remains that Honthorst and Vandyke just after Holbein, and Jan de Mabuse just before him, could have found, among English maids and wives, the lofty graces which he never saw. Exceptions might be made, however, in favor of Elizabeth, Lady Rich; for "high-erected thought" is bodily manifest in her, as in the dark-eyed Lady Lister, and in Lady Surrey, a sweet patient good woman who had known tears. Lady Butts is pleasingly modern. At what four-to-six has one met her? All the ladies of the More family are alluring acquaintances; and no one is to be envied who does not declare for Lady Richmond, with her absurd cap and feather, the big water-drop-shaped pearls in her ears, the downcast lids, and that delicious, kissable, cheerful mouth!
Our famous old friend, the great sovereign who saw fit to box the ears of offending gentlemen, and make war upon their wives, possesses the North Gallery. Pale, beaked, sinister; amiably shrewd, like Becky Sharp; now as a priggish infant with a huge watery head, anon as a parrot-like old woman; here with dogs frisking about her, and there with a grimace which would scatter a pack of dogs to the four winds; always swathed in inexpressible finery, Elizabetha Dei Gratia Regina arises on the awed spectator's eye. Her vanities were fairly inherited from her straddling sire. Any authentic portrait of her is a mass of fluff and sparkle, an elaborate cobweb several feet square, in which, after much search and many barricades of haberdashery surmounted, you shall light upon the spectral spider who inhabits them. There is nothing much more entertaining in this world than a study of the royal and virginal wardrobe. Those were epic clothes! They defy analysis, from the geyser of lace circling the neck and ears in a dozen cross-currents, to the acute angles of the diamonded, rubied stomacher, and the stiff acre of petticoat. They brought employment and money to artists, who painted in the significant occupant as they could, and they serve to illustrate for ever the science of dress-making, whose heraldic shield should bear Eve couchant on one side, and Elizabeth rampant on the other. In the balcony above is No. 484, an appalling picture of Her Majesty, in a ruff like isinglass. When we recall that, grown old, she had all her mirrors broken, and all paintings of herself which were not liars destroyed, what must have been the terrors of that countenance for which such a copy as this proved sufficiently flattering! Despite Zucchero, Hilliard, and Pourbus, he is the wisest man alive who knows how that illustrious lady really looked. And as you glance about, be it on the first visit or the twentieth, full of optical and consequent historical bewilderment; as you see how to right and left of Queen Bess the hosts of that wonderful reign have gathered again, you become keenly aware that one who died in the parish of S. Andrew Undershaft, in 1543, "should have died hereafter." Hunger for that bygone genius is in your thought there: O for an hour of Hans Ho. pinxit!
1890.