DOUBLE PORTRAIT OF JAKOB MEYER AND HIS SECOND WIFE, DOROTHEA KANNENGIESSER 1516 BASEL GALLERY ] [Sidenote: PORTRAITS OF MEYER AND HIS WIFE] A much more important work of the same year, 1516, also in the Basel Gallery (No. 312),[125] is the double portrait of the Burgomaster of Basel, Jakob Meyer or Meier “zum Hasen,” so called from the sign of a hare which hung upon his house, and his second wife, Dorothea Kannengiesser (Pl. 15). This new patron of Holbein’s proved to be an excellent friend, giving him more than one commission, and obtaining important public work for him. Meyer was a man of influence in Basel, and was the first citizen not of knightly birth to be elected as burgomaster. His election took place in 1516, and it was no doubt in honour of this event that he ordered the portraits. He was again elected to the post in 1518 and 1520—no one was allowed to fill it for two years in succession; but in 1521 he fell into disgrace, through secretly accepting a higher pension from the French king than the laws of the city allowed. For this he was dismissed from office, and made to refund the money, with the exception of the fifteen crowns which was the permitted sum. Objecting to this treatment, he was clapped into prison, and was only released on his family paying a fine. During his burgomastership many important changes took place in the municipal government of Basel, and the Church and the nobility were gradually deprived of all their privileges. In his younger days he had served as a soldier in Italy with some distinction, and after his deprivation of office he went there again, in 1524, as captain of a Basel troop in the pay of France. On his return home he attempted without success to obtain the annulment of the decree against him of exclusion from all public offices; and during the religious disturbances of 1529 he was at the head of the Catholic party, then in armed opposition to the Reformers. The reasons which induced Meyer to choose Holbein as the painter of the portraits of himself and his young, comely, and newly-married wife, when there were older painters of repute in the town, are not known; but his first wife, Magdalena Baer, had been a sister of the Hans Baer for whom the Zürich table had been painted, and it may have been owing to this connection that the young artist obtained his first introduction to the burgomaster.