In 1542 he began the large painting which was ordered to commemorate the granting of a charter by Henry VIII. to the newly-incorporated Company of Barber Surgeons, which still hangs in the Company’s Hall in London. He did not live to complete it. Some of the heads of the principal physicians he had finished, but the greater part of the picture, including the huge and ugly figure of the King, out of all proportion to the other persons represented, was put in by some other and far inferior hand. At least two of the doctors represented in this work were also painted by him separately, _Dr. John Chambers_ (Vienna) and _Sir William Butts_, as well as the latter’s wife. Holbein died in the following year, 1543, carried off by the plague, which then raged in London. The exact date of his death is not known, but he made a hasty will on October 7, and on November 29 administration was granted to his old friend Hans of Antwerp, the goldsmith. He was living at the time in the parish of St. Andrew Undershaft, where he was rated as a foreigner. He is supposed to have been buried in the Church of St. Katherine Cree, but no record of this has been discovered. His wife died in 1549. His eldest son Philip, “a good, well-behaved lad,” served his apprenticeship in Paris, and finally settled in Augsburg, founding that branch of the family upon which the Emperor Matthias conferred a patent of nobility as the Holbeins of Holbeinsberg. His second son James died as a goldsmith in London, while his daughters married respectable citizens of Basle. THE ART OF HOLBEIN Holbein’s art was many-sided, although, during the latter half of his life, he was occupied chiefly with portraiture. This was not owing to the artist’s preference for this mode of expression, but to the fact that there was very little demand for any other form of painting in England. The painter of _The Meyer Madonna_ was not the man to have abandoned the production of large religious compositions if there had been any adequate demand for them. His few works of this nature which remain place him in the front rank of sixteenth-century artists, and, if he had been born on the south side of the Alps, he would have painted sacred pictures as fine as those of any Italian cinquecentist; even Raphael would have found in him a worthy rival.