of the Italian models upon which it is based, and in all ways the picture indicates that when the elder Holbein put forth his greatest powers he was worthy of being ranked among the best German painters of the early sixteenth century. VOL. I., PLATE 4. [Illustration: THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE HANS HOLBEIN THE ELDER NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ANCIENT ART, LISBON ] Although he does not appear to have had many opportunities of exercising his skill as a portrait-painter, his very numerous studies in this branch of art show abilities of a very high order, and possess many of the qualities, though in a lesser degree, which his son afterwards developed to so high a pitch of perfection. Indeed, in these portrait-studies of men his art attains its greatest strength and finest accomplishment. Sixty-nine of his drawings of heads are preserved in the Imhoff Collection in the Berlin Museum. They are on the leaves of sketch-books, and were made between 1509 and 1516, in silver-point and pencil, some of them strengthened with white and with red chalk. A smaller number of heads from the same series are in the Copenhagen Museum, and at Basel and Bamberg, while isolated examples are to be found in the print rooms of more than one European museum. Some of the Basel drawings were made before 1508, and in the collection of M. Léon Bonnat, which contains several fine silver-points by the elder Hans, there is one of the Augsburg goldsmith, Jörig Seld, dated 1497. [Sidenote: THE ELDER HOLBEIN’S STUDIES]