It is an immense loss to art that all his large decorative undertakings, and many of his most important pictures, have perished or have been lost, so that to-day we can only judge of them by a few preliminary studies, certain fragments of the originals which have been preserved in museums, and, in a few cases, some early and careful copies of a reduced size. The decorations with which he covered a number of houses in Lucerne and Basle have all disappeared. What the weather did not ruin the clumsy hand of the restorer and street-improver has destroyed. A number of his sacred pictures must have perished during the artist’s lifetime through the fury of iconoclastic mobs. Damp, dirt, and neglect were the cause of the gradual fading away of his wall-paintings in the interior of the Basle Town Hall. His two great allegorical works for the decoration of the dining-hall of the Steelyard--_The Triumph of Riches_ and _The Triumph of Poverty_--have vanished, either destroyed in the Whitehall fire of 1698 or dispersed at the sale of Charles I.’s pictures. Some such fate seems also to have befallen the great portrait group of _Sir Thomas More’s Family_. The great wall-painting in the Privy Chamber in Whitehall was also destroyed by fire. Gone, too, is _The Battle of Spurs_, which, if Mr. Nicholls is right, was painted by our artist. Finally, death cut short the painting of the picture in the Barber Surgeons’ Hall. Such a list of lost or ruined masterpieces is, unhappily, not uncommon in the history of art, but Holbein has suffered more than most men; yet enough remains from his brush to allow us to place him among the greatest men of genius of his own or any succeeding age. As already stated, he owed little to any other master than his father. It is impossible to say to what extent he assisted the elder painter in the series of sacred pictures now preserved in Augsburg and elsewhere in Germany, although certain critics hold that he took a large share in the production of _The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian_ in Munich. This picture is the elder Holbein’s masterpiece, and in it, more than in any other of his works, he has thrown off the German mediævalism in which he was trained, and has emulated the newer style of the Renaissance, with its fine flowing lines and rounded forms and its exact imitation of Nature. It was to this German painter of repute that Holbein was indebted for almost all the artistic training he received. His painting was not affected to any extent by other artists except, indirectly, by the Italians of the North; but what was talent in the father became genius of the rarest quality in the son. LARGE DECORATIVE WORKS AND WALL-PAINTINGS.