Book: The Old Masters and Their Pictures

S >> Sarah Tytler >> The Old Masters and Their Pictures




Holbein was in the habit of painting his larger portraits on a peculiar
green, and his miniatures on a blue background. He drew his portrait
sketches with black and red chalk on a paper tinted flesh-colour. It is
said, that with the exception, of Philip Wouwermann, no painter has been
so unfortunate in having the works of other painters attributed to him
as Hans Holbein has been, and 'that three out of every four pictures
ascribed to him are misnamed.'[37]

The 'Meier, or Meyer Madonna,' is otherwise called 'the Meier Family
adoring the infant Christ in the arms of the Virgin.' The subject is
understood to prove that it must have been painted in Holbein's youth,
before Protestantism was triumphant at Basle. The figures are the
Burgomaster Meier and his wife, whom Holbein painted twice; their son,
with a little boy _nude_ beside him; another woman, elderly, conjectured
to be a grandmother of the family, and beside her the young daughter of
the house. In the centre on a turkey carpet stands the Madonna, holding
in her arms an infant stretching out its left hand to the group of
worshippers. In course of time, and in its transfer from hand to hand, a
doubt has arisen with regard to the subject of this picture. Some
critics have regarded it as a votive picture dedicated in a private
chapel to commemorate the recovery from sickness or the death of a
child. This conjecture seems to rest mainly on the fact, that the child
in the Dresden copy (it is said to be otherwise in the Darmstadt
picture) is of an aspect so sickly, as to have given rise to the
impression that it represented an ailing, or even a dead child, and no
glorious child Christ. Critics have gone still farther, and imagined
that the child is a figure of the soul of a dead child (souls were
sometimes painted by the old painters as new-born children), or of the
soul of the elder and somewhat muffled-up woman who might have been
recently dead. Mr Ruskin regards the picture as an offering for the
recovery of a sick child, and thus illustrates it:

'The received tradition respecting the Holbein Madonna is
beautiful, and I believe the interpretation to be true. A father
and a mother have prayed to her for the life of their sick child.
She appears to them, her own child Christ in her arms; she puts
down her child beside them, takes their child into her arms
instead; it lies down upon her bosom, and stretches its hand to
its father and mother, saying farewell.'

Yet another much more prosaic and less attractive interpretation of the
picture has been suggested by Holbein's biographer, that the two
children may represent the same child. The child standing by his brother
may be the boy restored to health, the feeble child in the arms of the
Virgin may indicate the same child in its sickness, while the extended
arm may point to the seat of the disease in an arm broken or injured.
After all, the child may simply be a child Christ, marred in execution.
I have given this dispute at length, because I think it is interesting,
and, so far as I know, unique in reference to such a picture. By an odd
enough mistake this very picture was once said to be the famous More
Family picture.

The idea of the 'Dance of Death' did not originate with Holbein, neither
is he supposed to have done more than touch, if he did touch, the
paintings called the 'Dance of Death,' on the wall of the Dominican
burial-ground, Basle, painted long before Holbein's day, by the order of
the council after the plague visited Basle, and considered to have for
its meaning simply a warning of the universality of death. But Holbein
certainly availed himself of the older painting, to draw from it the
grim satire of his woodcuts. Of these there are thirty-seven designs,
the first, 'The Creation;' the second, 'Adam and Eve in Paradise;' the
third, 'The Expulsion from Paradise;' the fourth, 'Adam Tilling the
Earth;' the fifth, 'The Bones of all People;' till the dance really
begins in the sixth. Death, a skeleton, as seen through the rest of the
designs, sometimes playing on a guitar or lute, sometimes carrying a
drum, bagpipes, a dulcimer, or a fiddle, now appearing with mitre on
head and crozier in hand to summon the Abbot; then marching before the
parson with bell, book, and candle; again crowned with ivy, when he
seizes the Duke, claims his partners, beginning with the Pope, going
down impartially through Emperor of Francis I., nobleman, advocate,
physician, ploughman, countess, old woman, little child, etc., etc., and
leading each unwilling or willing victim in turn to the terrible dance.
One woman meets her doom by Death in the character of a robber in a
wood. Another, the Duchess, sits up in bed fully dressed, roused from
her sleep by two skeletons, one of them playing a fiddle.

Granting the grotesqueness, freedom, variety, and wonderful precision of
these woodcuts, I beg my readers to contrast their spirit with that of
Albrecht Duerer's 'The Knight, Death, and the Devil,' or Orcagna's
'Triumph of Death.' In Holbein's designs there is no noble consoling
faith; there is but a fierce defiance and wild mockery of inevitable
fate, such as goes beyond the levity with which the Venetians in the
time of the plague retired to their country-houses and danced, sung, and
told tales, till the pestilence was upon them. It has a closer
resemblance to the piteous madness with which the condemned prisoners
during the French Reign of Terror rehearsed the falling of the
guillotine, or the terrible pageant with which the same French, as
represented by their Parisian brethren, professed to hail the arrival of
the cholera.

Of the 'More Family' there are so many duplicates or versions, that, as
in the case of Erasmus's picture, it is hard to say which is the
original picture, or whether Holbein did more than sketch the original,
or merely sketch the various heads to be afterwards put together by an
inferior artist. A singular distribution of the light in the best
authenticated picture has been supposed to favour this conjecture. But
under any supposition, this, the second of the three noted English
family pictures, is of the greatest interest. I shall record a minute
and curious description given of this 'More Family,' which is still in
the possession of a descendant of the Mores and Ropers.

'The room which is here represented seemed to be a large dining-room. At
the upper end of it stands a chamber-organ on a cupboard, with a curtain
drawn before it. On each end of the cupboard, which is covered with a
carpet of tapestry, stands a flower-pot of flowers, and on the cupboard
are laid a lute, a base-viol, a pint pot or ewer covered in part with a
cloth folded several times, and _Boetius de Consolatione Philosophiae_,
with two other books upon it. By this cupboard stands a daughter of Sir
Thomas More's, putting on her right-hand glove, and having under her arm
a book bound in red Turkey leather and gilt, with this inscription round
the outside of the cover--_Epistolica Senecae_. Over her head is written
in Latin, _Elizabeth Dancy_, daughter of Sir Thomas More, aged 21.

'Behind her stands a woman holding a book open with both her hands, over
whose head is written _Spouse of John Clements_.[38]

'Next to Mrs Dancy is Sir John More in his robes as one of the justices
of the King's Bench, and by him Sir Thomas in his chancellor's robes,
and collar of SS, with a rose pendant before. They are both sitting on a
sort of tressel or armed bench, one of the arms and legs and one of the
tassels of the cushion appear on the left side of Sir Thomas. At the
feet of Sir John lies a cur-dog, and at Sir Thomas's a Bologna shock.
Over Sir John's head is written, _John More, father, aged_ 76. Over Sir
Thomas's, _Thomas More, aged_ 50. Between them, behind, stands the wife
of John More, Sir Thomas's son, over whose head is written _Anne
Cresacre, wife of John More, aged_ 15. Behind Sir Thomas, on his left
hand stands his only son, John More, pictured with a very foolish
aspect, and looking earnestly in a book which he holds open with both
his hands. Over his head is written, _John, son of Thomas More, aged_
19.' (The only and witless son of the family, on whom Sir Thomas made
the comment to his wife:--'You long wished for a boy, and you have got
one--for all his life.')

'A little to the left of Sir Thomas are sitting on low stools his two
daughters, Cecilia and Margaret. Next him is Cecilia, who has a boot in
her lap, clasped. By her side sits her sister Margaret, who has likewise
a book on her lap, but wide open, in which is written, _L. An.
Senecae--Oedipus--Fata si liceat mihi fingere arbitrio meo, temperem
zephyro levi_. On Cecilia's petticoat is written, _Cecilia Heron,
daughter of Thomas More, aged_ 20, and on Margaret's, _Margaret Roper_,
_daughter of Thomas More, aged_ 22.' (The best beloved, most
amiable, and most learned of Sir Thomas's daughters, who visited
him in the Tower and encouraged him to remain true to his
convictions, while her step-mother urged him to abjure his faith.
Margaret Roper intercepted her father on his return to the Tower
after his trial, and penetrating the circle of the Guards, hung on
his neck and bade him farewell. There is a tradition that she
caused her father's head to be stolen from the spike of the bridge
on which it was exposed, and, getting it preserved, kept it in a
casket. She and her husband, William Roper, wrote together the
biography of her father, Sir Thomas More.)

'Just by Mrs Roper sits Sir Thomas's lady in an elbow-chair (?), holding
a book open in her hands. About her neck she has a gold chain, with a
cross hanging to it before. On her left hand is a monkey chained, and
holding part of it with one paw and part of it with the other. Over her
head is written '_spouse of Thomas More, aged_ 57.'

(Dame Alice More, the second wife of Sir Thomas More, a foolish and
mean-spirited woman.)

'Behind her is a large arched window, in which is placed a flower-pot (a
vase) of flowers, and a couple of oranges. Behind the two ladies stands
Sir Thomas's fool, who, it seems, was bereft of his judgment by
distraction. He has his cap on, and in it are stuck a red and white
rose, and on the brim of it is a shield with a red cross on it, and a
sort of seal pendant. About his neck he wears a black string with a
cross hanging before him, and his left thumb is stuck in a broad
leathern girdle clasp'd about him. Over his head is written _Henry
Pattison, servant_ of Thomas More. At the entrance of the room where Sir
Thomas and his family are, stands a man in the portal who has in his
left hand a roll of papers or parchments with two seals appendant, as if
he was some way belonging to Sir Thomas as Lord Chancellor. Over his
head is written _Joannes Heresius, Thomae Mori famulus_. In another room
at some distance is seen through the door-case a man standing at a large
sleeved gown of a sea-green colour, and under it a garment of a
blossom-colour, holding a book open in his hands written or printed
in the black letter, and reading very earnestly in it. About the
middle of the room, over against Sir Thomas, hangs a clock with
strings and leaden weights without any case.'[39]

It is notable that not one of Sir Thomas's sons-in-law is in this
picture, neither is there a grandchild, though one or more is known to
have been born at the date.

The miniature of Anne of Cleves, if it ever existed, is lost; it is
probable that what was really referred to was the portrait of Anne by
Holbein in the Louvre, where she appears 'as a kindly and comely woman
in spite of her broad nose and swarthy complexion, but by no means such
a painted Venus as might have deceived King Hal.'[40]

A well-known portrait by Holbein is that of a 'Cornish Gentleman,' with
reddish hair and beard. I saw this portrait not long ago, as it was
exhibited among the works of the Old Masters, and so much did it look
as though the figure would step from the frame, that it was hard to
believe that more than three hundred years had passed since the original
walked the earth.[41]

Doubtless the last of Holbein's portrait pieces, which it is reported he
left uncompleted when he died, is that of the 'Barber Surgeons,' painted
on the occasion of the united company receiving their charter from the
king, and including the king's portrait. This picture still hangs in the
old company's hall.

I have only to say a few more words of those sketches which survive the
destruction of the picture--Holbein's allegory of the 'Triumph of
Riches,' and the 'Triumph of Poverty,' and of his portrait sketches. In
the 'Triumph of Riches,' Plutus, an old man bent double, drives in a
car, drawn by four white horses; before him, Fortune, blind, scatters
money. The car is followed by Croesus, Midas, and other noted misers and
spendthrifts--for Cleopatra, the only woman present, is included in the
group. In the 'Triumph of Poverty,' Poverty is an old woman in squalor
and rags, who is seated in a shattered vehicle, drawn by asses and oxen,
and guided by Hope and Diligence. The designs are large and bold. In the
first, a resemblance to Henry VIII, is found in Croesus. If the
resemblance were intentional on Holbein's part, it showed the same want
of tact and feeling which the painter early betrayed in his caricature
of Erasmus.

But the best of Holbein's drawings are his portrait sketches with
chalks, on flesh-tinted paper. These sketches have a history of their
own, subsequent to their execution by Holbein. After being in the
possession of the art-loving Earl of Arundel, and carried to France,
they were lost sight of altogether for the space of a century, until
they were discovered by Queen Caroline, wife of George II., in a bureau
at Kensington. You will hear a little later that the finest collection
of miniatures in England went through the same process of disappearance
and recovery.[42] These original sketches, in addition to their great
artistic merit, form a wonderful collection of speaking likenesses,
belonging to the court of Henry VIII.,--likenesses which had been
happily identified in time by Sir John Cheke (in the reign of
Elizabeth), since the names of the originals have been inscribed on the
back of each drawing, as it is believed, by Sir John Cheke's hand. The
collection is now in the Queen's library, Windsor, with photographs at
Kensington Museum. There are one or two of Holbein's reputed portraits
at Hampton Court.

I must pass over some painters as not being sufficiently represented for
my purpose. Among these is Sir Antony More, Philip II, of Spain's
friend. It is recorded that Philip having rested his hand on the
shoulder of More while at work, the bold painter turned round, and
daubed the royal hand with vermilion. This gave rise to the
courtier-saying that Philip 'made slaves of his friends, and friends of
his painters.' Another is Zucchero, one of the painters who was
requested by Queen Elizabeth to paint her picture without shade, the
result being 'a woman with a Roman nose, a huge ruff and farthingale,
and a bushel of pearls.' There are also Van Somer,--Janssens, who
painted Lady Bowyer, named for her exquisite beauty, 'The star of the
East,' and Susanna Lister, the most beautiful woman at court, when
presented in marriage to Sir Geoffrey Thornhurst by James I, in
person,[43]--and Daniel Myttens, all foreigners, Flemish or Dutch, whom
we must thus briefly dismiss. And now we come to Van Dyck.

Antony Van Dyck was born at Antwerp, in 1599. His father was a merchant;
his mother was famous for painting flowers in small, and for needlework
in silk. The fashion of painting 'in small' had prevailed for some time.
Horace Walpole mentions that the mother of Lucas de Heere, a Flemish
painter, born in 1534, could paint with such 'diminutive neatness' that
she had executed 'a landscape with a windmill, miller, a cart and horse,
and passengers,' which half a grain of corn could cover. At ten years of
age, Van Dyck began to study as a painter, and he soon became a pupil,
and afterwards a favourite pupil, of Rubens. In 1618, when Van Dyck was
but a lad of seventeen years, he was admitted as a master into the
painters' guild of St Luke. Two years later, he was still working with
Rubens, who, seeing his lameness of invention, counselled him to abide
by portrait painting, and to visit Italy. A year later, in 1621, when
Van Dyck was twenty years of age, he came to London, already becoming a
resort of Flemish painters, and lodging with a countryman of his own,
worked for a short time in the service of James I.

On Van Dyck's return to Flanders, and on the death of his father, he was
able to take Rubens' advice, and in 1623, when Van Dyck was still only
twenty-two years of age, he set out for Venice, the Rome of the Flemish
painters. Before quitting Antwerp, Van Dyck, in proof of the friendship
which existed between the painters, presented Rubens with several of the
former's pictures, among them his famous portrait of 'Rubens' wife.' As
a pendant to this generosity, when Van Dyck came back to Antwerp, and
complained to Rubens that he--Van Dyck--could not live on the profits of
his painting, Rubens went next day and bought every picture of Van
Dyck's which was for sale.

Van Dyck spent five years in Italy, visiting Venice, Florence, Rome, and
Palermo, but residing principally at Genoa. In Italy, he began to
indulge in his love of splendid extravagance, and in the fastidious
fickleness which belonged to the evil side of his character. At Rome he
was called 'the cavalier painter,' yet his first complaint on his return
to Antwerp was, that he could not live on the profits of his painting!
He avoided the society of his homelier countrymen.

At Palermo, Van Dyck knew, and according to some accounts, painted the
portrait of Sophonisba Anguisciola, who claimed to be the most eminent
portrait painter among women. She was then about ninety years of age,
and blind, but she still delighted in having in her house a kind of
academy of painting, to which all the painters visiting Palermo
resorted. Van Dyck asserted that he owed more to her conversation than
to the teaching of all the schools. A book of his sketches, which was
recovered, showed many drawings 'after Sophonisba Anguisciola.' She is
said to have been born at Cremona, was invited at the age of twenty-six
by Philip II, to Spain, and was presented by him with a Spanish don for
a husband, and a pension of a thousand crowns a-year from the customs of
Palermo.

The plague drove Van Dyck from Italy back to Flanders, where he painted
for a time, and presented his picture of the 'Crucifixion' to the
Dominicans as a memorial gift in honour of his father, but in Flanders
Rubens' fame overshadowed that of every other painter, and Van Dyck,
recalling an invitation which he had received from the Countess of
Arundel while still in Italy, came a second time to England, in 1630,
when he was about thirty years of age, and lodged again with a
fellow-countryman and painter named Gildorp. But his sensitive vanity
was wounded by his not at once receiving an introduction to the king, or
the countenance which the painter considered his due, and the
restlessness, which was a prominent feature in his character, being
re-awakened, he withdrew once more from England, and returned to the Low
Countries in 1631. At last, a year later, in 1632, Van Dyck's pride was
propitiated by receiving a formal invitation from Charles I., through
Sir Kenelm Digby, to visit England, and this time the painter had no
cause to complain of an unworthy reception. He was lodged by the king
among his artists at Blackfriars, having no intercourse with the city,
save by water. He had the king, with his wife and children, to sit to
him, and was granted a pension of two hundred a-year, with the
distinction of being named painter to his Majesty.

A year later Van Dyck was knighted. Royal and noble commissions flowed
upon him, and the king, who had a hereditary love of art, visited the
painter continually, and spent some of the happiest and most innocent
hours of his brief and clouded life in Van Dyck's company. Thus began
Van Dyck's success in England.

To give you an example of how often, and in how many different manners,
Van Dyck painted the king and royal family, I shall quote from a list of
his pictures--

'King Charles in coronation robes.'

'King Charles in armour' (twice).

'King Charles in white satin, with his hat on, just
descended from his horse; in the distance, view of the
Isle of Wight.'

'King Charles in armour, on a white horse; Monsieur
de St Antoine, his equerry, holding the king's
helmet.'

'The King and Queen sitting; Prince Charles,
very young, standing at the King's side; the Duke of
York, an infant, on the Queen's knee.'

'The King and Queen holding a crown of laurel
between them.'

'The Queen in white.'

'Prince Charles in armour' (two or three times).

'King, Queen, Prince Charles, and Princess Mary.'

'Queen with her five children.'

'Queen with dwarfs,[44] Sir Geoffrey Hudson having
a monkey on his shoulder.'

Van Dyck had several great patrons, after the king. For the Earl of
Arundel, in addition to portraits of the Earl and Countess, the painter
designed a second Arundel family picture, which was painted by
Fruitiers. For George, Duke of Buckingham, Van Dyck painted one of his
finest double portraits of the Duke's two sons, when children. For the
Northumberland family Van Dyck painted, besides portraits of Henry and
Algernon, Earls of Northumberland, another famous picture, that of the
two beautiful sisters, Lady Dorothy Percy, afterwards Countess of
Leicester, and her sister, Lady Lucy Percy, afterwards Countess of
Carlisle, whose charms figure frequently in the memoirs of her time.
William and Philip, Earls of Pembroke, were also among his patrons, and
for the second he painted his great family picture, 'The Wilton
Family.' Sir Kenelm Digby, too, whose wife Venitia was more frequently
painted than any woman of her day, and was not more distinguished for
her beauty than for her lack of nobler qualities. Van Dyck alone painted
her several times, the last after her sudden death, for her vain and
eccentric, if gallant, husband, who in the end was no friend to Van
Dyck.

But these high names by no means exhaust the list of patrons of a
painter who, among various contradictory qualities, was indefatigably
industrious. His work is widely distributed among the Scotch as well as
the English descendants of the nobility whom he painted, so that the
possession of at least one ancestral 'Van Dyck' accompanies very many
patents of nobility, and is equivalent to a warrant of gentle birth.

The Earl of Clarendon, in the next reign, had a great partiality for Van
Dyck's pictures, and was said to be courted by gifts of them until his
apartments at Cornbury were furnished with full-length 'Van Dycks.' A
third of his collection went to Kitty Hyde, Duchess of Queensberry, one
of the Earl's three co-heiresses. Through the Rich family many of these
'Van Dycks' passed to Taymouth Castle, where by a coincidence they were
lodged in the company of numerous works of George Jamieson of Aberdeen,
who is said to have been for a short time a fellow-pupil of Van Dyck's
under Rubens, who has been called 'the Scotch Van Dyck,' and who is
certainly the first native painter who deserves honourable mention.
Since the death of the last Marquis of Breadalbane these travelled 'Van
Dycks' have gone back to the English representative of the Rich family.

Van Dyck had forty pounds for a half, and sixty pounds for a
whole-length picture;--for a large piece of the King, Queen, and their
children, he had a hundred pounds. For the Wilton family picture he had
five hundred and twenty-five pounds. But Van Dyck soon impaired his
fortune. He was not content with having a country-house at Eltham in
Kent, where he spent a portion of each summer; he would emulate in his
expenditure the most spendthrift noble of that reign. 'He always went
magnific so good a table in his apartment that few princes were more
visited and better served.' His marriage was not calculated to teach him
moderation. In his thirty-ninth year the King gave him the hand of Marie
Ruthven, who was nearly related to the unhappy Earl of Gowrie. She was
his niece, her father having been the scarcely less unhappy younger
brother Patrick, a physician, who, apprehended when a young man on the
charge of being concerned in the treason of his elder brothers, spent
his manhood in the Tower. He was kept a prisoner there from 1584 to
1619, nearly forty years, and was only released in his age and infirmity
when his mind was giving way. Patrick Ruthven's infant daughter had been
adopted, either through charity or perversity, by Anne of Denmark, and
brought up first at the court of Anne, and afterwards at that of
Henrietta Maria. The assertion that Marie Ruthven was a very beautiful
woman has been contradicted. It was said that 'she was bestowed in
marriage on Sir Antony Van Dyck as much to humble further the already
humbled and still detested family of Ruthven, as to honour the painter;
but this does not seem consistent with King Charles's known favour for
Van Dyck. Yet such a view might have been entertained by Marie Ruthven
herself, who, according to tradition, held herself degraded by the
marriage, and never forgave the degradation. She was not a loving wife
to a man who could hardly have been a very loving or loyal husband. And
certainly the marriage did not unite the painter closer to the king.

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.